The Religion and State Project, Constitutions Dataset, 1990-2002

The Religion and State (RAS) project is a university-based project located at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. Its goal is to create a set of measures that systematically gauge the intersection between government and religion. This dataset examines constitutional clauses that address religion for 169 states on a yearly basis between 1990 and 2002. This constitutes all countries with populations of 250,000 or more, as well as a sampling of smaller states.

Data File

Cases: 169
Variables: 2,007
Weight Variable: None

Data Collection

Date Collected: 1990-2002

Original Survey (Instrument)

RAS Constitutions Codebook 1990-2002

Funded By

Israel Science Foundation and The Sara and Simha Lainer Chair in Democracy and Civility

Collection Procedures

Constitutions were located primarily from the following sources: the Religion and Law International Document Database, the International Constitutional Law project, the Political Database of the Americas, and the University of Richmond Constitution Finder. In most cases, these databases provided English language translations of constitutions not written in English, usually academic or official government translations. Otherwise, I translated the constitutions using Google Translate. To test Google Translate's accuracy, I compared several constitutions for which translations were available to a translation of the original document by Google Translate. While the translations were never identical, none of the differences would have influenced the codings.

Sampling Procedures

This project coded all countries which in 2003 had a population of at least 250,000 and Western democracies with lower populations.

Principal Investigators

Jonathan Fox, Bar Ilan University and Shmuel Sandler, Bar Ilan University.