Resumen de How Constitutional Rights Matter

Stephen Gardbaum

• How Constitutional Rights Matter is a pathbreaking book that substantially advances our understanding of the relationship between “parchment barriers” and rights protection in practice. It provides the most comprehensive empirical analysis by far of whether and, importantly, which constitutionalized rights have a real-world impact, and presents a sophisticated explanatory theory of the resulting differences. This is a masterful work that exhibits, indeed showcases, the full promise of empirical scholarship in comparative constitutional studies. At the same time, perhaps, the book also suggests certain of the methodology’s limits.

  Adam Chilton and Mila Versteeg set out to answer the fundamental question of “when constitutional rights matter.”1 That is, as they see it, do de jure rights translate into better rights protection de facto? They approach this question by employing the three main empirical methods: global statistical (or large-N) analysis, case studies, and survey experiments. The book focuses on the...