Katarzyna Metelska-Szaniawska (University of Warsaw) 26.10.2023
It is our pleasure that doc. Katarzyna Metelska-Szaniawska (University of Warsaw) will present on Thursday, October 26, 2023, at 12:45 in room RB437 about her research on the topic „Economic Consequences of Non-Compliance with Constitutions – The Post-Socialist ´Illiberal Democracy´ Perspective”.
Registration is not required and anyone who would like to attend is warmly invited.
ABSTRACT: In this paper we study the effects of the discrepancy between de jure constitutions and their de facto implementation in post-socialist countries of Europe and Asia in the period 1993-2020. Constitutional economics views the constitution as a credible commitment mechanism allowing to counteract time-inconsistency problems that arise when drafting and implementing economic policy. Expecting that de jure-de facto gaps undermine the effectiveness of this mechanism, we verify the hypothesis that noncompliance with de jure constitutional rules in practice has adverse economic effects in post-socialist countries. We build upon the conceptualization of constitutional (non-)compliance by Voigt (2021) and test the hypothesis empirically for 28 post-socialist countries using the new Comparative Constitutional Compliance Dataset (Gutmann et al. 2022) and a dynamic panel strategy in the spirit of Acemoglu et al. (2019). The shift of focus from global studies to a single region – post-socialist countries of Europe and Asia, which share a common experience of socialism/communism while still differing in many other political, economic, and social characteristics, allows not only to mitigate typical problems of limited cross-country comparability but also to establish the missing connection between the emerging constitutional economics literature on de jure-de facto gaps and existing works on democratic backsliding and illiberal democracies. In this way, we develop a more comprehensive framework for the analysis of constitutional compliance problems, in particular for relatively young and incomplete democracies, as well as formulate recommendations for constitution drafters, legislators, and political decision-makers.
BIO: Katarzyna Metelska-Szaniawska, Ph. D. hab., is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Warsaw (Poland) and Director of the Centre for Economic Analyses of Public Sector (CEAPS). Her research focuses on Constitutional Law and Economics, Public Choice, and Political Economy, and was published i.a. in the European Journal of Political Economy, Review of International Organizations, European Journal of Law and Economics, Constitutional Political Economy, Economics of Transition and Institutional Change. She was a Marie Curie fellow and visiting scholar at LICOS Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance at the University of Leuven (Belgium). She is the former President of the Polish Association of Law and Economics (PSEAP) and Vice-President of the European Association of Law and Economics (EALE).
