Tom Ginsburg Wins American Political Science Association Award for Best Book
The University of Chicago Law School is honored to recognize Professor of Law Tom Ginsburg and his book The Endurance of National Constitutions for being selected as the American Political Science Association Comparative Democratization Section Award for Best Book.
The award is given for the best book in the field of comparative democratization published in 2009. Ginsburg co-authored The Endurance of National Constitutions with Zachary Elkins of the University of Texas-Austin and James Melton of the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies. It was published by Cambridge University Press.
The Endurance of National Constitutions examines the causes of constitutional endurance from an institutional perspective and asks why some constitutions stand the test of time while others do not. The authors used an original set of cross-national historical data to produce the first comprehensive study of constitutional mortality, identifying constitutional design factors that increase the likelihood of a constitution's longevity.
Other scholars have praised The Endurance of National Constitutions for its exhaustive and comprehensive analysis of what makes constitutions survive and have predict that the book will have an enduring influence on the study of constitutionalism.
The APSA's Comparative Democratization Section Award exists to promote the analysis of the origins, processes, and outcomes of democratization among nations. The award will be presented at the association's annual meeting in September.
Ginsburg and Elkins are the founding directors of the Comparative Constitutions Project, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation to gather and analyze the constitutions of all independent nation-states since 1789.