American-style constitutions predict political freedom better than British ones

Evidence

11La Porta et al. (2001) classify 71 constitution along the ”British- American” dimension and find that the American system is a better predictor of political freedom, while the British system is a better predictor of economic freedom. — Philippe Aghion, Alberto Alesina, and Francesco Trebbi, Endogenous Political Institutions, 59

Categorization

• CANDY: A tidy, tweetable empirical inversion: each constitutional tradition wins on a different outcome.
• QUESTION: What explains the split — presidential separation of powers vs. parliamentary accountability? Worth chasing.