Individualism makes a country's constitution more credible.

A constitution sets the legal rules for a country, but leaders in some nations follow these rules while leaders in others ignore them. Researchers wanted to know why this happens and whether national culture plays a role. They looked at 115 countries using new measures of how well governments obey their own constitutions. They found that societies where people are more individualistic show higher levels of compliance with their constitutions. In these cultures, promises made by leaders to follow constitutional limits become more credible. This shows that written rules depend heavily on unwritten cultural habits. The researchers also found patterns matching past studies that link lower institutional quality to slower development in the modern Muslim world.

Why it matters

Constitutions only work if people actually follow them. This paper shows that a country's culture—specifically how individualistic its society is—strongly predicts whether its constitution is respected. That matters because constitutional compliance is linked to economic growth and political stability, and it suggests that formal rules alone aren't enough; the informal cultural environment matters too.

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