176 constitutions · 32 rights · 1789–2023
This site sets what a constitution declares against what a country is measured to practice. The comparison is an established research measure — Law & Versteeg’s work on constitutional compliance — made browsable. Start with the United States, which turns out to be unusual in both directions.
Where that sits among every scored country. The US delivers considerably more than its constitution promises — which is less a compliment than a description: the text is thin.
Every square is a country. Three are filled. The right has no analogue in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and no comparable practice measure anywhere in the world — nobody else collects data on it, because almost nobody else guarantees it.
This is the largest structural difference between the US Constitution and the modern global norm. It is a charter of negative liberties — limits on government — written before positive social rights became standard constitutional material.
No older constitution is still operating anywhere in the world. At 7,762 words it sits well under the median of 16,119. Age and brevity explain the pattern above: most of what other constitutions say about rights was written into them after 1945.
10 of the 32 rights tracked here have no US constitutional provision at all. Privacy and freedom of association are judicially inferred rather than written. The Constitution also never affirmatively guarantees universal suffrage; it bans specific grounds for denying the vote, which is a different thing.
The US ratified the ICCPR and the Convention against Torture, but has signed without ratifying 4 of the core UN human rights treaties — including the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Looking only at constitutions misses this entire layer of declared commitment.
Measured against its own text, these are the widest shortfalls — rights the Constitution declares at full strength where V-Dem’s expert ratings fall short of the promise.
The countries whose constitutions promise most relative to what they deliver are, almost without exception, not democracies. The pattern is strong enough that it reproduces a published finding from scratch.
The second list needs a caveat, and it is on the full rankings page: countries with no entrenched bill of rights start near zero on the declared side, so they rise to the top by construction. It is a finding about constitutional design, not a league table of freedom.