Self-Enforcing Constitutions: With an Application to Democratic Stability in America's First Century
36 Pages Posted: 19 Jul 2010 Last revised: 21 Dec 2013
Date Written: 2010
Abstract
Most students of constitutions focus on normative questions or study the effects of particular constitutional provisions. This paper falls into a third and much smaller tradition that attempts to study what makes some constitutions more likely to survive. This paper develops a theory of self-enforcing constitutions and then applies it to the early United States. But for the issue of slavery, constitutional democracy in the United States was self-enforcing by about 1800. Nonetheless, crises over slavery threatened the nation on numerous occasions. The Civil War decisively ended slavery as a source of political division, allowing self-enforcing democracy (for white males) to reemerge following the Compromise of 1877.
Keywords: Democracy, consolidation, constitution, self-enforcing institutions, stability, equilibrium
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