Chairs
• Forrest Hansen
• Joseph Brubaker

Certain principles are fundamental to constitutions worldwide because they define constitutionalism itself. These fundamental constitutional principles answer the question: “What makes a constitution a constitution?” These principles include:

(1) a written constitution that is difficult to amend;
(2) the source of power in the government is the people;
(3) vertical division of power between the state and constituent units;
(4) horizontal separation of power in the national government;
(5) protection of individual rights;
(6) rule of law; and
(7) only applies to government conduct.

This workshop presents, through empirical study, a statistical analysis of current constitutions of the 193 United Nations member states and Taiwan, comparing these seven fundamental constitutional principles and their relationship with the U.S. Constitution. Using Gower’s Distance and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering, our statistical analysis demonstrates that these seven fundamental principles are significant and persistent in modern state constitutionalism.