A model for assessing the lobby influence in the constitutions' social content

• Grant number: 19/17782-8
• Support type: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Effective date (Start): January 31, 2020
• Effective date (End): January 30, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science
• Principal Investigator: Cláudio Gonçalves Couto
• Grantee: Lucas Nascimento Ferraz Costa
• Supervisor abroad: Zachary Elkins
• Home Institution: Escola de Administração de Empresas (EAESP). Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Local de pesquisa : University of Texas at Austin (UT), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 18/05607-4 - Public participation and social rights in the new constitutionalism in Latin America, BP.PD

Abstract

The objective of this project is to structure a research framework in line with the international literature both on comparative constitutional law and lobby influence. Thus, to advance and improve the theoretical, methodological and empirical application of our postdoctoral research's preliminary findings, especially regarding the Constitutional Social Score Model (CSSM), an instrument we elaborated to assess the constitutions' social content, based on objective criteria, which redefined the potential of our comparative analysis. The project will be held at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) under the supervision of Prof. Zachary Elkins, a renowned scholar in comparative constitutionalism, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America and director of the Comparative Constitution Project (CCP), which provides systematic data on comparative constitutions and constitution-making. One of our specific objectives is to formalize and institutionalize the CSSM, creating an open interactive dataset of constitutions' social scores, combining our dataset with CCP's and begin a continuous project of applying the CSSM for historical constitutions (using the data available by the CCP). We, also, define a model, structured as a mixture of process-tracing and "gauging the degree of preference attainment" approaches, for assessing how the lobby influence in constitution-making processes impacts the constitutions' social content. In this project we briefly describe this model's functioning, which we intend to apply to analyze comparatively Latin American cases. This model considers the impact of lobby influence in contingence of a conditional variable (political willingness) determined by the constitution-making body's political composition regarding constitutionalizing social rights.