This paper develops a game-theoretic and dynamic framework to analyse how judicial manipulation by governing parties alters political incentives in multi-party systems. The model shows that biased legal enforcement can prompt politicians - even if innocent - to switch allegiance to the ruling party to avoid penalties, with decisions shaped by reputational, voter and institutional frictions. Strong frictions can sustain pluralistic equilibria despite judicial asymmetry, while weaker frictions or stronger incentives lead to a single-party convergence. Moreover, not only formal institutions limit the judicial weaponization but also by voters’ responsiveness to imbalances in enforcement. The model therefore highlights how even modest judicial biases can erode political pluralism over time, while also identifying the political and electoral conditions under which such dynamics can be contained.
The variation in political regimes among Muslim-majority countries, some embracing democracy while others remain authoritarian, has been the focus of academic research for a long time. We argue that the alignment between democracy and Islamic political views can be traced to the historical pathways through which Islam became politically embedded within a state. Specifically, states where Islamic political views entered through diplomatic means, such as trade, tend to align more closely with democratic principles. In contrast, states where Islamic views entered through conquest and war often show a misalignment with democratic principles. We test this argument across 49 Muslim-majority states and find that states with a positive entry of Islamic views are more likely to uphold democratic principles. This relationship is driven by the states’ ability to foster freedom, which encourages positive political competition among elites, which is an essential component for maintaining a healthy democracy. Our findings suggest that the non-democratic nature of some Muslim-majority states can be better understood by examining the processes through which Islamic views entered these states.
Mixed electoral systems combine majoritarian and proportional rules within a single institutional framework, promising what Shugart and Wattenberg (2001) called "the best of both worlds": local accountability alongside representational fairness. This article surveys the family of mixed systems—parallel, compensatory, proportional, and combined—and examines whether their constitutional promise has been fulfilled. Simulations of seat allocation under alternative mixed designs demonstrate that these systems generate markedly different seat distributions, undermining any unified claim about their representational properties. A systematic analysis of the paradoxes that have emerged over a quarter century of practice—excessive complexity, decoy parties, manipulative coalition coordination, uncontrolled parliamentary growth, and "zombie" legislators—reveals that strategic actors routinely exploit the gap between constitutional aspiration and institutional detail. We conclude by assessing how variation in the constitutional entrenchment of mixed systems shapes both the scope for manipulation and the capacity for reform. A Glossary of key concepts is included as an Appendix.
Although not known for his constitutional theory, Adam Smith had an approach to constitutions that rivals that of Madison. In many ways, Smith’s approach is more coherent and complete than Madison’s, in part because the format of the Federalist Papers required that its authors attack the problem of constitutionalism piecemeal. Essential elements in the Smithian scheme include the familiar separation of powers with an independent judiciary, but also less familiar elements, such as the right of resistance and bright lines as a set of mechanisms for providing incentives to political officials to adhere to the rules.
We develop a theory of voluntary government formation under ideological heterogeneity. Individuals gain from the benefits of collective governance but incur psychological losses when laws diverge from their preferred rules. Despite these conflicts and competition over collective benefits from government, individual and social gains are aligned. This gives rise to a two-stage bargaining process that is an ordinal potential game yielding cooperative game solutions. In the first stage, citizens sort into ideologically compatible governments. In the second, each government adopts compromise laws that maximize collective value, leading to government decisions being affected by both intensities and preferences. Equilibrium allocations follow the Shapley value. The model addresses Sen’s paradox and explains why large governments do not socialize ideological costs. Under voluntary formation, multiple governments emerge naturally and constitutional constraints on majority rule become necessary to accommodate the impacts of ideological differences. The analysis serves as a baseline for traditional governments. It also provides a perspective on the classical welfare frameworks of Harsanyi and Rawls.
This paper contributes an explanation for the rise in zero-sum thinking in the politics of western democratic countries. It sets out two new mechanisms that we argue have respectively played roles in undermining positive sum thinking and boosting the zero-sum kind and so combined to shift the terrain of politics in the zero-sum direction. The first mechanism involves politicians being increasingly regarded as ‘delegates’ rather than ‘trustees’. This reduces the scope for politicians to respond to positive sum opportunities. The second occurs when citizens decreasingly socially identify with economic class towards more essentialist/othering non-economic social identities. This inclines people towards zero-sum thinking and so reinforces the effect of the relative boost towards zero-sum thinking from politicians increasingly becoming ‘delegates’. In our analysis, a decline in trust is associated with the first and an increase in inequality with the second. The two mechanisms combine to lower the material gains enjoyed under democracy. This not only undermines support for democracies, but it also reinforces zero-sum thinking in what can become a zero-sum trap.
This article examines how authoritarian regimes legitimize major constitutional reforms and whether their justificatory language exhibits cross-national discursive isomorphism. It employs a mixed-methods design that pairs a cross-national institutional baseline with episode-centered discourse analysis. First, using V-Dem data (1989–2020) for closed and electoral autocracies, I estimate two-way fixed-effects models to situate reform episodes within broader institutional trajectories. The quantitative baseline is descriptive rather than causal and indicates substantial heterogeneity: on average, reform episodes are not uniformly associated with institutional backsliding and may coincide with modest openings. Second, I analyze reform-era texts in five authoritarian episodes (Iran 1989; Venezuela 1999; Hungary 2011; Turkey 2017; Russia 2020) and a matched set in three liberal democracies (Switzerland 1999; Finland 2000; France 2008). For each case, seven documents (elite speeches, constitutional texts, and official explanatory narratives) are coded in NVivo using an identical frame scheme. Relative to the controls, authoritarian cases place greater emphasis on national sovereignty, people-centeredness, saving-the-country crisis narratives, and stability; democratization language appears in both sets, while reform/modernization frames are more prominent in the controls. These comparisons distinguish regime-linked legitimation logics from broader reform rhetoric, while remaining agnostic about diffusion pathways (learning, parallel development, or field-level pressures).
The well-known tradeoff between participation and decisiveness extends into the realm of representation. The more voters can hold their representatives accountable for policy outcomes, the more difficult policy making—particularly policy making requiring difficult decisions—becomes. The result is the degradation of government’s ability to serve the general welfare by, for instance, regulating behavior that leads to a tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). Zakaria (2007) links this failure of elected government to exercise policy leadership to technological advances that allow politicians to receive near-instant feedback from public opinion. In essence, voters who can easily hold politicians qua central agents accountable will punish those agents for prioritizing the collective welfare over their individual interests. The problem is particularly acute for medium- and long-term policy initiatives, as the less immediately visible are positive policy outcomes, the less chance that voters will look kindly on the sacrifices they have to make to achieve them. The basic problem is that democratic accountability makes policy makers less willing to take the kinds of policy risks involved in innovation, experimentation, or even long-term investments or other far-sighted policies. Weakening central agency thus amplifies long-term societal welfare loss, transforming policy making into a common-pool resource problem. The problem arises because parties can’t take full credit for policies whose benefits extend to other parties’ voters, and because they can share with their coalition partners any blame for the costs of targeted policies that benefit only their own supporters. I argue that multiparty coalitions counter the common-pool resource problem of public-goods provision. The key, echoing Demsetz (1967) and Shepsle (1979), is that parties can expect to receive all the credit (or blame) they are due for policy in any issue areas that are seen as their responsibility. Blame shifting and credit claiming are feasible only when coalition partners’ responsibilities overlap, something that is more likely the more policy areas coalition parties control. Since coalition parties will as a rule control fewer ministries the more parties there are in government, all else equal, it follows that multiparty coalitions should be better equipped to make policy for the long term the more parties they include. Two-party coalitions, on the other hand, are qualitatively different from their multiparty counterparts and should perform particularly badly when faced with hard decisions.
Combating communicable diseases produces public goods, and public health institutions play a crucial role when transaction costs are high. Over the past decade, populism has surged globally, shaping public attitudes toward these institutions. Rooted in anti-elitism and a Manichean worldview that divides society into “the good people” and “the corrupt elites,” populists often target individuals while undermining the institutions that constrain them. Using data from the 2020 American National Election Studies, this study examines how individual-level populist attitudes are associated with views of democratic institutions, public health institutions and officials, and COVID-19 related policies in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show that populist attitudes are associated with opposition to democratic institutions for checks and balances, support for unconstrained executive authority, lower trust in both the federal government and people in general, negative perceptions of public health organizations and officials, including the CDC, the WHO, Dr. Fauci, and scientists, and opposition to expert-recommended pandemic policies, even when for anti-intellectualism, party identification, liberal–conservative ideology, education, race, sex, and income. By contrast, although more educated respondents also express skepticism toward the federal government and negative perceptions of the CDC and the WHO, they tend to show higher levels of interpersonal trust and stronger support for democratic institutions as well as checks and balances. This contrast suggests that skepticism toward government does not necessarily entail targeting individual actors or opposing the universalistic institutional constraints that sustain democratic governance.
Left-leaning populist regimes, such as Rafael Correa’s government in Ecuador (2007–2016), often claim to protect the environment from the negative effects of free-market regimes. This study examines the environmental impact in Ecuador following the 2008 Constitution, which was the first in the world to include rights of nature. We find no statistical evidence that Correa’s constitutional change had any measurable effect on Ecuador’s macro-level environmental outcomes, as captured by forest cover, greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy output, and carbon intensity of GDP.
Public spending and deficit fluctuations during electoral cycles have been the focus of increasing research in developed and emerging economies. Electorally driven fiscal expansions often lead to higher debt levels, sometimes necessitating engagement with International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs. These programs typically include conditions aimed at reducing budget deficits, and can limit the incumbent government’s ability to pursue expansionary fiscal policies ahead of elections. In this study, we employ an Intervention Analysis approach using monthly data to examine Albania’s budget deficit in the context of elections. We differentiate between elections held under active IMF programs and those conducted independently. Our findings reveal that budget deficits tend to rise before and during elections, with this increase being pronounced when elections occur without an IMF program. In contrast, elections held under active IMF oversight show no notable increase in deficits. The results are consistent across alternative specifications and estimation approaches. These findings contribute to the literature on Political Budget Cycles and offer valuable policy insights. Specifically, we find that supranational oversight, such as that provided by the IMF, can play a crucial role in mitigating election-driven debt surges – a critical issue for economies with high levels of public debt.
Electoral reforms to first-past-the-post are often expected to consolidate party systems, but parties can instead coordinate without merging. We develop a partition-function framework distinguishing party consolidation from district-level coordination (“Duvergerian moves”), where allies strategically withdraw candidates across districts to maximize seats. We motivate the argument with the 2024 French legislative election, where coordinated withdrawals by NFP and Ensemble sharply reduced multi-candidate runoffs and helped block National Rally. We then study Poland’s Senate after the 2011 switch to single-member districts. Despite limited change in the effective number of parties, opposition parties progressively refined district coordination, culminating in near-complete one-candidate-per-district arrangements in 2019. We propose three coordination indices to measure the extent and effectiveness of such strategies, showing how coordination can reproduce majoritarian incentives while preserving party identities.
In this paper I examine Chile’s 1972 initiative to draft a new constitution under President Salvador Allende. I analyze the political and economic circumstances that gave rise to the project and the institutional mechanisms through which the draft sought to advance a socialist economic and political program centered on state ownership of means of production and central planning. I compare the Chilean proposal with the socialist constitutions of the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia. The draft, which was never submitted to a plebiscite, as Allende envisioned, subsequently disappeared and remained unavailable for nearly two decades. Remarkably, the proposal has attracted very limited scholarly attention.
The ancient Roman Republic was the longest-lived popularly governed state in human history yet is understudied in democracy research. This essay provides a systematic overview of the Republic’s political institutions and practices, assembling recent historical evidence in a form accessible to democracy scholars. I argue that, by the criteria used to classify classical Athens and the United States as democracies, the Roman Republic was also a democracy. To substantiate this claim, I combine qualitative analysis of its institutions and practices with quantitative evidence, calculating democracy index scores using the Polity5 rubric and the Economist Intelligence Unit rubric, both of which classify the Republic as a democracy. The essay highlights several unique features of the Republic’s institutions that may have contributed to its longevity, and its ability to flourish in the competitive ancient Mediterranean world.
What drives popular support for political executives? Compared to normal times, we know little about how the public responds to executives in extraordinary circumstances, and we know even less about similarities and differences across crisis events. While a calculating public may sanction incumbents for adverse events, the unexpected nature of many crises has the potential to increase leaders’ approval ratings. Based on time series analyses of executive approval from 35 countries across 25 years and drawing on an original Crisis Events Dataset, we show that the strength of rallies corresponds to crises’ degree of plausible exogeneity and to whether their resolution requires concentrated action by the government. Crises in three domains – security, the environment, and public health – tend to produce rallies rather than reprimands, while economic shocks yield no direct effect on approval. Lastly, we find that institutional features are less important in predicting approval during crises than they are in normal times. By demonstrating crises’ potential to upend the mechanisms of political accountability, our findings lay a foundation for further inquiry into how political context matters for public opinion in extraordinary times.
Adam Smith defended commercial society because it provided liberty and security—essential conditions for tranquility and human happiness—superior to feudalism’s chronic dependence and anxiety. However, Smith recognized some serious pathologies, such as vanity-driven character corruption, inequality of esteem distorting moral judgment, and merchant conspiracies threatening markets. This paper examines whether twenty-first-century societies meet Smith’s justificatory conditions. While material prosperity and legal development have advanced dramatically, political capitalism has emerged as a systematic problem where economic and political elites cooperate through regulatory capture, rent-seeking, and barriers to competition. This system simultaneously undermines Smith’s benefits—reintroducing dependence, corrupting impartial justice—while intensifying his concerns by generating extreme inequality that amplifies character corruption and distorted sympathy. The contemporary challenge is preserving competitive markets and impartial institutions against political capture that threatens the very conditions justifying commercial society.
Political diversity, voter engagement, and institutional stability are foundational to effective economic governance and democratic legitimacy. While the literature has extensively examined the impact of voting rules in single-winner elections, the constitutional implications of seat allocation methods in multi-winner parliamentary systems—specifically their impact on party fragmentation—remain underexplored. This article investigates the institutional nexus between seat allocation rules and parliamentary structure in Senegal and Burkina Faso, two emerging democracies with distinct electoral trajectories. Drawing on computational simulations and a comparative analysis using the Laakso-Taagepera Effective Number of Parties (ENP) index, we evaluate six electoral systems—including the D’Hondt method, First-Past-The-Post, and mixed approaches—and their effects on representation, participation, and institutional resilience. Anchored in the framework of constitutional political economy, our analysis considers how electoral rules shape the strategic behavior of political actors. The findings suggest that proportional systems enhance minority representation, though they increase fragmentation (higher ENP), while majoritarian systems promote stability at the potential cost of diversity. These results underscore that seat allocation rules are not merely technical choices but strategic constitutional instruments that mediate the trade-off between representativeness and governance efficiency, with long-term implications for institutional performance and democratic consolidation.
Hayek’s “road to serfdom” concern is often discussed in terms of fiscal expansion. We argue that the relevant margin is instead the implementation form of welfare provision: case-by-case administrative discretion versus general, prospective rules. Drawing on Hayek’s critique of comprehensive planning in The Road to Serfdom and his later rule-of-law criteria in The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty, we develop a dynamic political-economy model that isolates the institutional conditions under which implementation form, rather than fiscal scale, generates selection pressure toward discretionary rule. Voters weigh perceived operational gains from administrative governance (speed and fine-grained targeting) against expected policy-error losses under information-intensive administration and citizen-borne process costs (opacity, red tape, weaker avenues for appeal). Greater reliance on instruments that require case-by-case judgment (such as exemptions, waivers, and individualized transfers) increases the probability of electing discretionary politicians, especially when problems become salient and implementation is knowledge intensive. In repeated competition, electoral incentives can encourage the introduction of further exceptions that accumulate over time, generating upward drift in discretion absent binding constraints. State capacity has ambiguous effects: it reduces policy error but can also increase the effectiveness of discretionary control. We then analyze constitutional meta-rules requiring generality, automaticity, and independent review. These rules cap the probability of selecting discretionary politicians even during crises and other high-salience events, without limiting aggregate fiscal size, and they channel policy toward universal, formula-based programs. The framework clarifies conditions under which large welfare states remain compatible with liberal constitutional order.
This paper examines the evolution, disruption, and reconstitution of Kuwait’s 1962 Constitution across six decades of political development. Framed as one of the region’s earliest experiments in liberal constitutionalism within a hereditary monarchy, the Constitution established popular sovereignty, legislative authority, and civil liberties alongside extensive executive power. Since its promulgation, however, Kuwait has experienced recurring cycles of constitutional suspension and restoration, most notably in 1976, 1986, and the recent 2023–2024 crisis. Through historical, legal, and political analysis, the paper traces how these suspensions were justified, the constitutional articles violated particularly Articles 50, 106, 107, and 181 and the mechanisms through which constitutional life eventually re-emerged. It highlights the role of civil society, diwaniyyas, political factions, and judicial institutions in defending constitutional norms even during periods of executive overreach. The study situates Kuwait within comparative frameworks of hybrid constitutionalism, showing parallels with other Middle Eastern and post-colonial systems where liberal provisions coexist with entrenched monarchical authority. Despite repeated violations, the 1962 Constitution has endured as a central source of political legitimacy, shaping both elite bargaining and public expectations. The paper argues that Kuwait’s constitutional history reveals a distinctive pattern of resilience rooted in societal memory, institutional learning, and recurring pressures for restoration.
There have been revolutions, and wars have been fought over ideology. Ideological competition at the more benign level of intellectual thought involves different views and theories of the preferred organization of society. In the ideological contest between socialism and capitalism, Marxian theory is consistent with a society being best served by a command economy in a one-party state with collective property, and, for capitalism, western economic theory is expected to be consistent with societal benefits of democracy and markets. There is, however, a puzzle. Basic theories in western economics conclude that the democracy and markets of western civil society are dysfunctional. The theories were proposed by Nobel laureates and entered western economics during the era of the 20th century cold war. Asking about the sources and circumstances of the cold-war theories leads to evidence suggesting a Trojan horse in a case study of the political economy of ideological persuasion.
