Journal of Constitutional Political Economy just published (Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2017 pp. 311-320) our article “A Proposal for a More Objective Measure of De Facto Constitutional Constraints”.

Simple and easily correctable measures of institutions are based on observable / detectable events, not on the experts’ personal opinion.

We tried to detect (initially) three types of events, so for each country at each year we ask just three questions:
1. Will the ruling elite leave power and join the opposition if it loses an election (the power rotation criterion developed by Adam Przeworski )?
2. Has the government ever lost in court and complied with the court’s decision even if the litigation significantly reduced its prestige and authority?
3. Can the media and opposition criticise the government [including (a) accusations about its incompetence, (b) immorality, or (c) crimes, and call for its replacement, without experiencing intimidation or punishment]?

…

see for further details the paper   Yanovskiy Moshe, Ginker Tim ” A Proposal for a More Objective Measure of De Facto Constitutional Constraints ” Journal of Constitutional Political Economy, DOI: 10.1007/s10602-017-9242-1, 2017

The full text of the article could be send by request (corresponding authors’ mail is yanovskiy.moshe at gmail.com).