Constitutional rigidity matters

Traditionally, constitutional amendment rules are considered to be the most important part of a constitution. Nevertheless, recent empirical analyses suggest that constitutional amendment rules have no impact whatsoever. This dispute arises from the misuse of independent and dependent variables and the application of an inappropriate methodology. Using the veto players approach to measure constitutional rigidity, I create a new index covering 94 democratic countries. I explain why the lack of constitutional rigidity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for significant constitutional amendments in democratic countries. Finally, I create a new dataset on the significance of constitutional amendments and estimate the appropriate (heteroskedastic) model, which corroborates the theoretical expectations and demonstrates that more significant amendments lead to a better fit.