Sonia Mittal

Self-Enforcing Constitutions

July 2009, with Barry Weingast

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.

The Constitutional Choices of 1787 and their Consequences

April 2009, with Jack Rakove and Barry Weingast.

The most striking contribution of the Constitution — one often taken for granted — was the creation of a successful, stable, republican government: a government capable of adapting to the wide variety of changes that future generations would bring. Without this accomplishment, the United States would likely have not achieved long-term economic growth.

Presented at the NBER "Founding Choices" conference, May 8-9 2009, and forthcoming in Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s, edited by Douglass Irwin and Richard Sylla, University of Chicago Press.

Constitutional Stability in a Changing World: Institutions, Knowledge, and Adaptive Efficiency

March 2009

This paper presents a new perspective on self-enforcing constitutions that accounts for constitutional stability in context of unforeseen change. Dynamically stable constitutions build what North (2005) has called adaptive efficiency — the capacity to flexibly adjust in the face of shocks and evolve institutions that effectively deal with an altered reality. In confronting the manifest deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, America's constitution-makers did more than solve the problem of chronic instability by creating checks and balances on legislative assemblies. They boldly confronted the challenges inherent in preserving political stability in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world. In doing so, they self-consciously articulated a positive, epistemic theory of adaptation what was foremost concerned with the nature and quality of the deliberative process itself.

Creating Political Stability: Deliberation in Constitutional Conventions

March 2008

Successful creation of stable political institutions is critical to leading theories of democracy. However, these theories omit discussion of how elites and groups of citizens successfully reach compromises later institutionalized in pacts and constitutions. Implicitly they rule out the possibility that negotiations fail even when a suitable compromise exists. This paper argues flexible deliberative procedures promote the learning and experience necessary to create stable political institutions. In particular, they permit institutional designers to discover new issues that require discussion through the course of the deliberation. In doing so, designers can undo decisions that made good sense ex ante but ex post, seem unwise. The centrality of flexible deliberative procedures to successful negotiation is illustrated with formal and historical analysis of the use of motions to reconsider in the U.S. constitutional convention. Detailed analysis of constitutional debates provides a new explanation for the success of the Great Compromise giving each state equal representation in the Senate

"Trust but Verify": Strategic Investments in Expertise

June 2008

This paper explores the creation of redundant expertise within and across the separation of powers system. Consider the proliferation of intelligence agencies across bureaucracies or the creation of the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget. When do institutions in one branch invest in redundant expertise? When do they invest in specialized expertise? What are the implications or redundancy and diversity for political stability?

A Necessary Precaution: The Separation of Powers and Political Stability

June 2007

Drawing on the subtle argument of the Federalist, this paper demonstrates that competitive redundancies in the American separation of powers system were designed to ameliorate the unavoidable problems of human error and malfeasance. The separation of powers system reflects two related dimensions of constitutionalism that work to reduce the likelihood and mitigate the effects of error and malfeasance. First, the separation of powers contributes to the right-protecting functions of legislatures by rendering the final passage of unjust or destabilizing legislation less likely. Second, overlap and competition between the branches reduce the likelihood of error by improving the quality of deliberation. In particular, competition creates adaptive efficiency — the ability to respond effectively to unforeseen circumstances.