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Legal scholars have long debated whether written constitutions constrain government power more effectively than unwritten constitutional conventions, yet a comparative study of thirty-one democracies conducted between 2014 and 2023 suggests the answer depends less on documentation than on enforcement architecture. The research, which tracked instances of executive overreach and the mechanisms used to check them, found that nations with strong judicial review, independent electoral commissions, and a free press curtailed abuses of power at similar rates regardless of whether their founding charter was a single codified document or a patchwork of statutes and precedent. Countries lacking such enforcement bodies, however, experienced overreach at nearly three times the rate of those with them, even when their constitutions contained explicit prohibitions against the conduct in question. The study's authors point to a recurring pattern: constitutional text can specify limits, but only an institution empowered to invoke real consequences, such as nullifying a law, removing an official, or triggering public exposure, actually enforces those limits in practice. This finding has practical implications for governance reformers, who have historically prioritized drafting comprehensive constitutional language over building the institutions needed to apply it. Several nations that underwent constitutional rewrites in the past decade saw little improvement in accountability because the newly drafted protections were not paired with newly empowered watchdogs. The authors caution against interpreting their results as an argument for weak or informal constitutions; rather, they argue that written text and enforcement capacity are complements, not substitutes, and that reform efforts neglecting either element are likely to fall short of their goals. Governance is, in this view, ultimately a matter of institutional muscle as much as legal architecture.