Economic and Social Rights in National Constitutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much has been written about the global convergence on constitutional supremacy, and the corresponding rise of an apparently universal constitutional discourse, primarily visible in the context of rights. In this Paper, we examine the global constitutional homogeneity claim with respect to economic and social rights. Based on a new and unique dataset that identifies the status of sixteen distinct economic and social rights in the world's constitutions (195 in total), we make four arguments. First, although economic and social rights (ESRs) have grown increasingly common in national constitutions, not all ESRs are equally widespread. Whereas a right to education is so common as to be practically universal, a right to food and water is still very rare. Second, constitutions accord ESRs different statuses, or strengths. More than some one-third of countries identify all economic and social rights as justiciable, another third identify some ESRs as aspirational and some as justiciable, and the last third identify ESRs as aspirational or entrench fewer than two. Third, legal tradition— whether a country has a tradition of civil, common, Islamic, or customary law— is a strong predictor of whether a constitution will have economic and social rights and whether those rights will be justiciable. Fourth, whereas regional differences partly confound the explanatory power of legal traditions, region and legal tradition retain an independent effect on constitutional entrenchment of ESR. We conclude by suggesting that despite the prevalence of economic and social rights in national constitutions, as of 2013 there is still considerable variance with respect to the formal status, scope and nature of such rights. Because the divergence reflects lasting determinants such as legal tradition and region, it is likely to persist.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".