On Thursday, 22 May 2025, Simón Ballesteros successfully defended his PhD dissertation, titled Explaining Variation in the Democratic Character of Constitution-Making Processes: A Comparative Analysis”, at Georgetown University. Using quantitative analysis of an original dataset of 348 constitution-making processes between 1945 and 2024, along with a qualitative case study of Chile’s most recent sequence of constitution-making processes, Simón shows how the configuration of actors and the type of conflict preceding constitution-making shape the democratic nature of the processes through which national constitutions are drafted. Following on from the completion of his doctoral research, Simón is due to join GLO as a Research Associate at the University of Chicago.
