Methodology

Comparing what a constitution declares against what a country practices is an established research measure, not an invention of this site. Law & Versteeg, Sham Constitutions (California Law Review, 2013) built a de jure/de facto compliance score and produced a constitutional “hall of fame” and “hall of shame”. Chilton & Versteeg, How Constitutional Rights Matter (2020), extends the approach. This site makes that comparison browsable.

As a check on our own wiring, we reproduce their directional finding: underperformers should be dominated by non-democracies, overperformers by democracies whose constitutions promise little. They are. Across the twelve largest gaps in each direction, mean V-Dem liberal democracy score is 6% among underperformers and 83% among overperformers.

Declared

Comparative Constitutions Project, Characteristics of National Constitutions v5.0 (Elkins & Ginsburg). ~2,000 coded variables across 18,363 country-years in which a constitution was in force. Every constitution is coded twice by independent coders.

Practiced

V-Dem Country-Year Full+Others v16 (Coppedge et al., V-Dem Institute). 4,618 indicators across 28,092 country-years, reaching back to 1789, built from aggregated expert ratings.

Declared internationally

Ratification status for the nine core UN human rights treaties (OHCHR). A constitution is not the only place a country makes promises.

Constitutional text

Constitute Project, which publishes the CCP corpus with topic tags. Text is linked and excerpted rather than rehosted.

CCP codes are mapped to a 0–1 scale using the v5.0 codebook. The mapping is deliberate, because the codes do not mean what they appear to mean:

• 97 “Unable to Determine” → missing. Never zero.
• 98 “Not Specified” → 0. The constitution is silent, so the right is absent — a real answer, not a gap in the data.
• 90 “left to non-constitutional law” → 0. The question is what the constitution declares.
• 96 “other” → 0.5, a qualified guarantee.

Distinguishing 97 from 98 matters more than it sounds: on freedom from torture, 37% of country-years are coded 98. Treating those as missing would discard a third of the world; treating them as zero is correct, because those constitutions genuinely do not prohibit torture.

Several variables are graded rather than binary. Prohibitions on torture, cruelty and slavery score 1 when universal, 0.75 when suspended in wartime, 0.5 when partial, 0 when explicitly allowed.

Each right maps to one or more V-Dem indicators, min-max normalized across all country-years so values stay comparable over time as well as between countries. Where a right maps to several indicators, the mean is used. V-Dem’s v2x_ indices are already 0–1 and pass through effectively unchanged.

gap = practiced − declared

1. A gap is never shown alone. Both underlying values appear beside it everywhere on this site. A lone composite invites precisely the misreading the site exists to prevent.
2. Ranks are more defensible than absolute differences. A binary de jure code and a continuous expert-survey measure are not on the same scale, so subtraction is a convenience, not a measurement.
3. Countries without an entrenched bill of rights are flagged. The UK, New Zealand, Israel and Australia protect rights by statute, common law and convention. They score near zero on declared rights and therefore look like enormous overperformers. That is a real finding about constitutional design, and it is labelled inline rather than left to look like a bug.

Proxy mappings. 4 rights have no exact practice measure and use the closest available stand-in. They are marked throughout:

• Right to form and join trade unions — Do NOT use CCP TRADEUN here — it codes a DUTY to join unions, the opposite of a right. V-Dem has no union-specific measure; CSO entry/exit freedom is the closest proxy.
• Right to privacy — US privacy is judicially inferred (4th/14th Amendments), not textual, so CCP codes it 2. V-Dem's private civil liberties index is a broad proxy, not a privacy measure per se.
• Right to shelter or housing
• Independent judiciary — CCP JUDIND requires an EXPLICIT declaration of judicial independence. Article III secures it structurally instead (life tenure, salary protection), so the US codes 0 here despite having a famously independent judiciary. Read this row as a measure of constitutional wording, not of institutional reality.

Rights with no practice measure at all. 9 rights are shown as declared only: presumption of innocence, right to legal counsel, protection from self-incrimination, protection from double jeopardy, trial by jury or lay participation, separation of religion and state, right to petition government, right to asylum, right to bear arms. They are displayed rather than dropped, because absence of a measure is not absence of a right. They never receive an invented score and are excluded from every composite.

Coverage. 202 countries appear; 176 are present-day. V-Dem also covers historical polities such as Baden and Saxony; these are kept in the data but excluded from rankings. A small number of countries present in V-Dem have no CCP counterpart and show an empty declared side.

Wording versus reality. Some CCP variables record whether a constitution uses particular language, which is not the same as whether an institution exists. Judicial independence is the clearest case: CCP asks for an explicit declaration, while the US secures independence structurally through life tenure and salary protection. The US therefore scores 0 on declared judicial independence despite a famously independent judiciary. Read that row as a fact about text, not about institutions.

Nothing here is hidden. Each right below lists the CCP variables behind its declared score and the V-Dem indicators behind its practiced score.

Elkins, Z. & Ginsburg, T. Characteristics of National Constitutions, v5.0. Comparative Constitutions Project, 2025.
Coppedge, M. et al. V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v16. Varieties of Democracy Project, 2026.
Law, D. & Versteeg, M. Sham Constitutions. California Law Review 101 (2013).
Chilton, A. & Versteeg, M. How Constitutional Rights Matter. Oxford University Press, 2020.