The Development of Arab Constitutions

The development of constitutions and their effects on political life are key concerns for comparative politics. However, we know relatively little about the development of constitutional politics in the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa.

Neil Ketchley’s 18-month-long John Fell-funded research project seeks to plug this gap by developing a new, publicly-available dataset of constitutional texts and amendments for all Arabic-speaking countries, from the colonial period to the present day.

By drawing on new tools from Arabic-language Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and natural language processing this corpus will provide answers to key questions such as:

• What accounts for the expansion and retraction of political rights for different societal groups?
• How have constitutional frameworks developed in response to major political events, e.g. decolonisation, coups, and the 2011 Arab Spring?
• How do regional autocrats draw on constitutions and legal frameworks to legitimize and reinforce their rule?

This project further strengthens DPIR’s research into constitutional politics, and in particular the new Constitution Hub, which is also funded by the John Fell Fund.