Uribe-Quintero, Juan

Constitutions play a key role in defining the structure, roles, rights, and responsibilities of nation states. Extant research has analyzed how features of constitutional design contribute to the materialization of democratic principles, including the separation of powers (V. Ostrom, 2008; Brinks, Levitsky & Murillo, 2019; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2019). Recent research applying the Institutional Grammar (IG) highlights the utility of the IG in deciphering how legal concepts are embedded within constitutions (DeMatee, 2023). Nevertheless, systematic use of the IG to characterize how specific characteristics of democracy materialize in constitutional architecture is yet to be developed.
This paper intends to make a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we use the IG 2.0 to understand how features of democracy materialize in Constitutional texts, using the theory of separation of powers as a basis for our analysis. Second, we aim to test, refine, and expand the current characterizations of the constitutive functions proposed by Frantz and Siddiki (2022). As such, we aim to answer a) what types of entities are being constituted in the constitutions of nation states, b) what types of constitutive functions are assigned to said entities, in relation to the principle of separation of powers, and c) whether, and if so how, do these entities and corresponding functions capture the theoretical features of the separation of powers.
To do this, we use a comparative case study approach. We purposefully selected constitutions from six countries, two in North America, two in South America, and two in Europe, to consider different legal traditions (common law and civil law) and regimes to conduct the study. Once identified, we focus on a particular subject of the Constitution, the provisions related to the separation of powers, and code each institutional statement using the IG. We later look for patterns and differences in the way each Constitution captures the idea of separation of powers.