The latter half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century witnessed a global wave of constitution writing. Scholarly examination of these new charters found that most embodied liberalism and democracy. Additional study, however, found that textual convergence among these “higher law constitutions” belied important heterogeneity in constitutionalism—that is, in the principles underlying these charters and associated attitudes and behaviors. Scholars adopted several conceptual strategies to accommodate this variation, including attaching adjectives to constitutionalism (for example, “globalizing constitutionalism” and “abusive constitutionalism”). This article analyzes this conceptual innovation, drawing on an original dataset of all mentions of the word “constitutionalism” paired with a qualifying adjective found in the title/abstract of articles or in the title/first substantive page of books/dissertations, written in English, published between 1945 and 2019 and referenced on the Internet. We identified 1,621 “adjective-constitutionalism combinations,” including 564 unique combinations, suggesting both extraordinary empirical variation and little coordination among scholars with regard to conceptualization. Moreover, scholars’ conceptualizations of constitutionalism rarely reference equality, justice, or state responsibility for pursuing those ideals, despite these values being logical extensions of higher law constitutions’ core precepts; indeed, some conceptualizations even reflected illiberal or rights-limiting principles of governance. These findings raise the specter of a disconnect between constitutions and constitutionalism that we hope future studies will examine.

二十世纪后半叶和二十一世纪初期，全球掀起了制宪浪潮。对这些新宪章的学术审查发现，它们大多体现了自由主义和民主。然而，进一步的研究发现，这些“更高法律宪法”之间的文本趋同掩盖了宪政主义的重要异质性，即这些宪章和相关态度和行为所依据的原则。学者们采取了几种概念策略来适应这种变化，包括给宪政添加形容词（例如“全球化宪政”和“滥用宪政”）。本文分析了这一概念创新，利用了所有提及“宪政”一词的原始数据集，并与文章标题/摘要或书籍/论文的标题/第一页中的限定形容词配对，以英文撰写，于 1945 年至 2019 年间出版并在互联网上引用。我们确定了 1,621 个“形容词-宪政组合”，其中包括 564 个独特的组合，这表明学者们在概念化方面存在着巨大的经验差异和很少的协调。此外，学者们对宪政的概念化很少提及平等、正义或追求这些理想的国家责任，尽管这些价值观是高级法律宪法核心规则的逻辑延伸。事实上，一些概念甚至反映了非自由或限制权利的治理原则。这些发现引发了宪法与宪政之间脱节的担忧，我们希望未来的研究能够对此进行检验。