Here are titles, abstracts, and links to my most recent working papers. (Check back often; more are always on the way!)
Bruce Ackerman is a luminary amongst constitutional law scholars. James Buchanan is the same for scholars of constitutional political economy. However, they are diametrically opposed in terms of their thinking on constitutional change. Ackerman is a decided majoritarian; alternatively, Buchanan's normative perspective is rooted in generality. Yet both Ackerman and Buchanan consider themselves constitutionalists. I provide a comparative analysis of Ackerman's views vis-àvis those of Buchanan on constitutional change. As a relative virtue, Ackerman provides more emphasis on the qualitative nature of consideration/deliberation on constitutional change; alternatively, a relative virtue of Buchanan is his insistence on generality and an (at least) implicit unwillingness to subjectively weight individuals in terms of their input to such change. I use Article V of the US Constitution as a vehicle for the comparative analysis.
Revolutionary Constitutional Compliance
with Jamie Bologna Pavlik and Justin T. Callais
Revolutions are bottom-up movements for regime change that, if successful, overthrow and replace a society’s principal institutions. Successful revolutions are often followed by a new Constitution. We explore whether revolutionary Constitutions, all else equal, lead to higher compliance than their non-revolutionary counterparts. To do so we combine data from the Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database (CCCD; Gutmann et al. 2023) and the Revolutionary Episodes Dataset (RED; Beissinger 2022). We identify 15 revolutionary Constitutions, adopted between 1976 and 2010, and consider their compliance relative to that of their predecessors. We employ matching methods (Rosenbaum and Rubin 1983), drawing on up to 61 cases of (non-revolutionary) Constitutional adoptions to construct counterfactual episodes. Revolutionary Constitutions lead to higher compliance at least 5 years out from their adoption. At 10 years out, the positive overall compliance effect gets weaker. However, the effect remains significant for basic human and civil rights provisions.