Moamen Gouda

Islamic Constitutions Index v.2 (1861-2022) Dataset

Considerable empirical literature shows that Islamic constitutional provisions have adverse impacts on gender equality, rule of law, protection of rights of religious minorities, as well as democracy. Nevertheless, a significant caveat with this body of literature is that the period investigated is considerably limited, usually between 1990 and 2014. Accordingly, the selected Islamic provisions in most of the investigated constitutions do not change much during this limited time frame, thus limiting robust examinations of the causality between Islamic constitutional provisions and various outcomes. The Islamic Constitutions Index, developed by Moamen Gouda and Dawood I. Ahmed (Ahmed and Gouda, 2015) remains the only dataset that offers a systematic coding of Islamic constitutional provisions. It covers the enacted national constitutions of the 57 member countries of the Organization of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) in the year 2014.

Mr. Gouda’s research focuses on Institutional Economics of Muslim-majority Countries, Law and Economics of Islam, Economics of Crime and Terrorism, and Islamic Constitutionalism. During his stay at CESifo, Mr. Gouda will continue to significantly expand the initial work on the Islamic Constitutions Index through investigating and codifying all historical and current constitutions of all OIC members, starting with the Tunisian constitution of 1861, which is considered to be the first constitution of a Muslim-majority country and extending to the constitutions in force in 2022. With the of aim of producing a second and much extended version of the Islamic Constitutions Index, he will modify and reorganize the 30 “Islamic clauses” identified by Ahmed and Gouda (2015) as capturing the universe of all Islamic clauses based on the Al-Azhar constitution. The new version of the Islamic Constitutions Index will enable an examination, ranking and comparison of the degree of “Islamicity” of all constitutions across the Muslim world. Trends and patterns of Islamic constitutionalism can be traced across time, countries and regions.

Moamen Gouda is Professor of Middle East Economics at the Graduate School of International and Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), Seoul, South Korea. He has been an elected board member at the Middle East Economic Association since 2019. He is a research fellow at Economic Research Forum, a research associate at Marburg Center for Institutional Economics at Philipps-University Marburg, and a visiting lecturer at Hamburg University’s Institute of Law and Economics, as well as Marburg University’s Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS). Moamen Gouda received his PhD in Economics in 2014 from Philipps-University Marburg. He received his MBA from Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University, UK. Mr. Gouda is currently serving as an editorial board member for the Journal of East Asian Affairs. His work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Economic Systems, Political Research Quarterly, Public Choice, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Disasters, Constitutional Political Economy, European Journal of Law and Economics and the British Journal of Middle East Studies, among others.