Constitutional Duties

Abstract

Individual duties—like the responsibility to defend the country, pay taxes, or obey the law—are frequently included in national constitutions, but they are rarely analyzed. This paper empirically examines the origins, evolution, and implications of individual duties in national constitutions using three data sources: (i) a new dataset of duties in national constitutions from 1781 to 2017; (ii) surveys on public support for constitutional duties administered to over 13,000 respondents from five countries—China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States; and (iii) an analysis of case law interpreting constitutional duties in seven countries—Ecuador, India, Ireland, South Korea, Tanzania, Thailand, and Uganda. Based on this data, we report four key. First, duties are a longstanding and increasingly common feature of constitutions, with roughly two-thirds of countries now having constitutional duties, and constitutions that include duties having an average of six different ones. Second, constitutions with more duties also typically contain more rights, suggesting that both duties and rights likely appeal to drafters aiming to use the constitution to transform society. Third, duties are widely supported by the public, roughly three-quarters or more of respondents supporting the nine duties we asked about, indicating little popular resistance to their constitutionalization. Fourth, despite their coexistence in constitutional texts, duties and rights may not complement each other in practice: countries with more duties often have worse human rights records, and the court decisions we analyzed frequently used constitutional duties to justify restricting rights.