Field:
Comparative Politics (Europe) & Quantitative Methods

Dissertation Title:
Politics of Constitution-Making: A Comparative Analysis of Constitutional Conventions

Committee:
George Tsebelis, (Chair), Kathleen Bawn, Ron Rogowski, Geoffrey Garrett, William Summerhill

Date of Completion:
June 2008

Contact Information:
Sven-Oliver Proksch
UCLA Political Science Department
4289 Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, California 90095-1472
Phone: 310-825-4331
Fax: 310-825-0778

Curriculum Vitae:
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Current Projects:
WORDFISH – A Scaling Model for Estimating Political Positions from Texts
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Dissertation Summary:
My dissertation project examines the institutional organization of constitutional conventions, defined as temporary parliamentary-style bodies convened for the purpose of drafting a constitution. While it is widely recognized that constitutional rules have important effects on political systems, there are surprisingly few studies that systematically investigate the drafting process itself. Yet, the literature points to a practical dilemma of constitution-making: on the one hand, the drafters need to delve into the details of institutions and processes, which is an inherently technical domain, demanding some degree of specialist constitutional expertise. On the other hand, it has been shown that ideology matters in constitutional negotiations and that politicians have clear preferences over institutional outcomes. Constitutional conventions typically divide into committees and do not stay in plenary session. I argue that, similarly to legislatures, the institutions governing the conventions shape delegates’ behavior. This has consequences for whether experts draft the constitution or whether ideological outliers do. To test these competing theories, I collected extensive data on delegates’ biographies and preferences for two major constitutional conventions: the European Union Convention (2002-2003) and the German Convention (1948-1949). In particular, the measurement of preferences is a methodological challenge due to differences in how delegates were able reveal their preferences in each convention. In the EU convention case, I use data on the endorsement of constitutional proposals submitted in the convention. In the German convention, members voted on proposals, but the votes were not recorded. I therefore use computer-based content analysis of delegate speeches to estimate positions. The empirical tests include simulations of whether the committee organization in each convention could have happened by chance alone or was biased, and an analysis explaining why individual delegates seek membership in the drafting committees of constitutional conventions.

Research Interests:
My core research interest is in European politics, including constitutional, legislative, and party politics. I am also interested in the estimation of ideology from text documents and have co-developed a scaling algorithm for measuring party positions from manifestos over time. (www.wordfish.org).

Teaching Interests:
I have served as a teaching assistant on six political science courses at UCLA, including several comparative politics courses (lower and upper division), game theory, and statistics. In addition, I have taught my own upper division political science course in 2007 on Comparative Constitutional Politics. A central element of this course was an in-class simulation of constitutional negotiations (Simulation Website: http://proksch.bol.ucla.edu/simulation/).