Compliance gaps and the failed promises of religious freedoms

The Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database

“…Of the four indicators measuring a de jure-de facto gap that we are aware of, the indicators by Metelska-Szaniawska ( 2021) and Mataic and Finke (2019) are not indicators of constitutional compliance in the narrow sense, because they conflate constitutional overand underperformance. This leaves the indicator by Law and Versteeg (2013) and V-Dem's v2exrescon as important reference points for our new constitutional compliance indicators.…”

“…Given that we are only interested in measuring compliance with rules guaranteed in the constitution, the de jure-de facto gap as operationalized in Metelska-Szaniawska (2021) is not suitable for our purposes. Mataic and Finke (2019) propose two indicators for the de jure-de facto gap in religious freedom. They use de jure data from the Religion and State Constitutions dataset (Fox 2012), capturing the constitutional protection of 21 religious freedoms, and two de facto indicators from the Religion and State dataset, round 3 (RAS3; see Fox 2017), which measure 65 restrictions of religious practices imposed on all religions or only on religious minorities.…”

“…The de jure and de facto rights do not match, meaning that it remains unclear whether restrictions of religious practices are really contradicting constitutional rules. By standardizing their indicators before subtracting, Mataic and Finke (2019) also give de jure and de facto rights different weights in the construction of the indicators.…”