CONSTITUTE allows you to interact with the world’s constitutions in a few different ways.
- Read the full text of any country’s constitution – click on CONSTITUTIONS in the menu and pick any constitution from the list to read. Or download it to your computer as a PDF file.
- Compare constitutions of any two countries. In the CONSTITUTIONS section, in the LIST VIEW mode, select any the constitutions to compare (in the circles on the right) and click on COMPARE. Or go directly to the COMPARE and select constitutions from the Swap Constitution dropdown lists.
- Quickly find relevant passages. Passages of each constitution are tagged with a topic—e.g., “right to privacy” or “equality regardless of gender”—so you can quickly find relevant excerpts on a particular subject, no matter how they are worded. You can browse the 300+ topics via the “Search | Topics | Filters” menu on the CONSTITUTIONS page.
After having the topic of your interest found, click on it to set a filter.
An example of selecting a topic: Rights and Duties > Equality, Gender, and Minority Rights > Citizenship of Indigenous groups. (Click to enlarge)You can also see suggested topics while typing in the search bar (which also lets you perform free-text queries).
Finally you can set filters by countries, the year of adoption (“from” and “to”), and the status (“in force,” “historical,” “draft”).
Once the topic is selected and the filters are set, click on VIEW RESULTS.
Adding filters: countries, adoption period, status. (Click to enlarge)On the page that will open, click on the country name (or on EXPAND on the right of the country name) to see how this topic is covered in this country’s constitution.
- View in the modes LIST VIEW or COMPARE. By default, the results will open in the LIST VIEW mode. You can also view the texts and excerpts of any two constitutions side-by-side in the COMPARE mode – just select any two countries in the circle on the right and click on COMPARE in the menu. In this mode, you can easily change the countries using the Swap Constitution dropdown menu.
- Pin for further analysis. Pin excerpts, comparisons, or searches by clicking the “pin” button next to an expanded passage, the pin button at the top of the search results page, or the pin button on the right side of the comparison page. You can then view and download your pinned content by clicking on the PINNED link in the upper right section of the Constitutions page. Pinned items can be exported to Google Docs, rendered in PDF, or downloaded in .csv.
- Learn more about each country’s constitutional history, explore the inventory of constitutional topics, or dig deeper into analyzing the data in the Countries, Topics, and Data Stories sections.
- Use data. Except for material identified as copyrighted by other parties, the content of constituteproject.org is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License (which allows you to make free use of information from the site for noncommercial purposes). An appropriate citation for material on the site would be:
Elkins, Zachary, Tom Ginsburg, James Melton. Constitute: The World’s Constitutions to Read, Search, and Compare. Online at constituteproject.org.
