We are happy to announce that the project of Prof. Katarzyna Metelska-Szaniawska received funding in the international Opus24+LAP/Weave call organized by the National Science Center. This is the first Opus-LAP/Weave project at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Warsaw, congratulations!

The project entitled „Does Constitution Making Matter? The Economics of Writing Social Contracts” will be carried out in partnership with the University of Hamburg and jointly coordinated by Prof. Jerg Gutmann from that university's Institute of Law and Economics. The duration of the project is 3 years and the financing granted by NCN for the Polish part of the project is 982'375 PLN. In the LAP/Weave framework the project will be co-financed by DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft / German Research Foundation).

The project, nested in the research program of constitutional economics, which emphasizes the role of constitutions in the functioning of the economy, aims to answer the question how constitution-making procedures influence the contents of constitutions and possibly their success in terms of the legitimacy they enjoy, the duration for which they survive, and the degree to which politicians comply with the constitution. The authors collect data and use econometric methods to study real-world constitution-making around the world at the country level, as well as use experiments to see how individuals in controlled settings perceive the outcomes of constitution-making under different procedures. Given that constitutions survive on average less than 20 years, every year a new constitution is passed somewhere and understanding how to improve the quality of these constitutions and their likely success, can hardly be overestimated..