Can public participation in constitution-making curb corruption?

Abstract

We employ “doubly robust” event studies and matching methods to explore whether public participation in Constitution-making can curb political corruption moving forward. Measures of public participation are drawn from the Constitutionalism and Democracy Database (CDD) (Eisenstadt et al., 2015, 2017a, 2017b) while corruption measures come from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem) (Coppedge et al., 2023; Pemstein et al., 2023). We generally report statistically insignificant effects. When estimates of public participation on corruption are significant – particularly for judicial corruption – they evidence small effects.