two others, drawn from the imperial Censorate (which became the Control Yuan)
and the examination bureaucracy (which became the Examination Yuan). He saw
the National Assembly as the embodiment of the people’s sovereignty, a superior
locus of power to all the government branches. Sun’s creative synthesis, while never
fully implemented anywhere, marks the major twentieth-century attempt to
develop a truly distinctive constitutional form in Asia.
In short, we observe three broad types of constitutional system in Asia: liberal-
democratic, hybrid, and socialist–Leninist. These obviously are not pure types.
But at a broad level, the typology is helpful for understanding the internal variation
in Asia.
ii. formal features of constitutions in asia
This section reports on several different measures of de jure power, utilizing data
I have developed with colleagues in the Comparative Constitutions Project
(CCP).
32
This is a large project to analyze and understand features of formal
written constitutions for all countries from 1789. We ask about some 667 dimen-
sions of constitutional design, for nearly 1 , 000 different constitutional systems,
contemporary and historical. We have produced a number of different summary
measures and indices in order to make the data more digestible, and we will report
on these data here. We describe each of the indices below.
Here we focus on current constitutions still in force today. The approach is to
analyze the data by region, in order to compare Asia with other regions of the
world. Furthermore, to reflect the typology developed above, we further divide
the seventeen countries in the region into three groups: liberal democracies (eight):
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, and East
Timor; hybrids (five): Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Brunei; and
Leninist (four): China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea.Table 2. 1 presents the
global comparisons for all indices, with sub-categories for the three Asian types.
Table 2. 2 provides the ranking of Asia among the different regions.
Scope and detail
In our work, we have developed measures of the specificity of national consti-
tutions, including two measures that we call scope and detail.
33
Scoperefers to the
breadth of coverage of the constitution, as measured by the number of topics
(according to an inventory of ninety-two potential topics from our survey) included
in the constitutional text.Detailrefers to the level of precision used to cover each
(^32) For more details on the project, seewww.comparativeconstitutionsproject.org.
(^33) Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton,The Endurance of National Consti-
tutions(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009 ).