The fact that the measures of institutions used in the literature reflect choices (often made
by dictators) rather than constraints is further illustrated by examining the
correlations between
these variables and written constitutional rules. We consider four such measures. The first two are
motivated by the work of Persson and Tabellini (2003) on electoral rules, which these authors see
as one of the important constraints on executive authority. One such variable we use is “plurality”,
which equals one if legislators are elected using a winner-take-all/first past the post rule. The other
objective measure is “proportional representation,” which equals one if candidates to the upper and
lower houses of parliament are elected using a proportional representation system. Both of these
variables come from Beck et al. (2001).
In addition, we use two constitutional measures of the
checks on the executive supplied by the judiciary from La Porta et al. (2004). The first is judicial
independence, which measures the permanency in office of supreme court judges. The second is
constitutional review, which measures the extent of judicial review of legislation. Again, all these
are constitutional measures of political rules constraining the executive.