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This book is intended for the scholar or graduate student who wants to learn about a new topic of research: the effects of constitutional rules on economic policymaking and performance. We draw on existing knowledge in several fields: economics, political science, and statistics. In particular, the book builds on theoretical work from the last few years, and it forms a natural sequel to our previous book, Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy, published by MIT Press in 2000. Whereas the previous volume focused mainly on theory, the purpose of this new book is uncompromisingly empirical. Taking the existing theoretical work in comparative politics and political economics as a point of departure, we ask which theoretical results are supported and which are contradicted by the data, and we try to identify new empirical patterns for a next round of theory. The empirical results we present in the book go beyond …