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"Constitutional conventions"
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Father Founders: Did Child Gender Affect Voting at the Constitutional Convention?
How did child gender affect deliberations and voting at the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention? Though recent scholarship has found profound and far-reaching influence of child gender upon the beliefs and behavior of modern parents, there is no reason to believe that this is only an important consideration in the present. Leveraging the natural experiment of child gender, we test whether the gender of a delegate's children influenced his voting. We hypothesize that fathers of sons would favor creating a strong national government because they could more easily envision their sons holding places in the emergent empire (especially younger sons). Using new data on delegates' children, we find statistically and substantively significant results: having sons indeed predicts delegates' favoring a stronger, centralized national government (with daughters showing an opposite effect). These differences are sufficiently large to have likely affected the Convention's proceedings and therefore the U.S. Constitution.
Journal Article
The year of living constitutionally : one man's humble quest to follow the Constitution's original meaning
\"The New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically chronicles his hilarious adventures in attempting to follow the original meaning of the Constitution, as he searches for answers to one of the most pressing issues of our time: How should we interpret America's foundational document?\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
It’s the procedures, stupid: The success and failures of Chile’s Constitutional Convention
Chile’s experience with its Constitutional Convention from 2021 to 2022 sheds light on an important issue for comparative reflection: the role of procedures in constitution-making processes. The Constitutional Convention was bound by procedures that were both externally imposed and internally created. Our assessment is that, while some procedures improved representation and deliberation, the most important decision-making procedures were pernicious to the process. We argue that looking at procedures is fundamental when analysing constitutional processes, as the rules that bind rule-making processes can significantly impact not only their functioning, but also their outcomes.
Journal Article
Frontier democracy : constitutional conventions in the Old Northwest
\"Frontier Democracy examines the debates over state constitutions in the antebellum Northwest (Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin) from the 1820s through the 1850s. This is a book about conversations: in particular, the fights and negotiations over the core ideals in the constitutions that brought these frontier communities to life. Silvana R. Siddali argues that the Northwestern debates over representation and citizenship reveal two profound commitments: the first to fair deliberation, and the second to ethical principles based on republicanism, Christianity, and science. Some of these ideas succeeded brilliantly: within forty years, the region became an economic and demographic success story. However, some failed tragically: racial hatred prevailed everywhere in the region, in spite of reformers' passionate arguments for justice, and resulted in disfranchisement and even exclusion for non-white Northwesterners that lasted for generations\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Chile’s failed constitutional intent: Polarization, fragmentation, haste and delegitimization
This article suggests that the conditions under which the Chilean constitutional process of 2021–22 undertook its task held the seeds of its doom. Constitutional conventions are always tasked with reaching agreements on the controversial allocation of decision rights, and doing so is no simple feat. The Chilean process combined (1) very dispersed preferences regarding the problems the new constitution should solve and the institutions to best enable solutions, with (2) a brief timeframe to allow for agreements to emerge, aggravated by (3) a composition of the Convention that was dominated by independents lacking experience in legislative bargaining, and (4) a severe disenchantment of the population with parties and politics as the backdrop. Together, these hurdles proved impossible to overcome. Despite the notorious political achievements of the Committee we study here, the proposal that came out of Chile’s Constitutional Convention in 2021 was plagued by controversy and a negative perception of the Convention’s work, and was ultimately rejected by the people.
Journal Article
Slavery in the Constitution: Why the Lower South Occasionally Succeeded at the Constitutional Convention
The Lower South’s successes at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 contributed to a constitution that prohibited federal interference with the slave trade until 1808, guaranteed fugitive slaves would be returned to their masters, and prevented export tariffs. We explain why the Lower South occasionally succeeded on sectional issues at the convention using a multiple-dimensional model of sincere voting, estimated using a new dataset of delegate votes, multiple imputation, and optimal classification. We argue that mixing sectional issues with powers of the federal government made the Lower South more mainstream and helped it gain support from various Northern delegations. We test this relationship using regression analysis and apply it to two substantive issues where the Lower South succeeded. The result is a largely new account of how slavery became encoded in the Constitution.
Journal Article
How do constitution-making processes fail? The case of Chile’s Constitutional Convention (2021–22)
This introduction to the symposium ‘How do Constitution-Making Processes Fail? The Case of Chile’s Constitutional Convention (2021–22)’ situates the project in the field of constitution-making, provides context regarding the Chilean case, summarizes some possible explanations for the failure, and describes how each article contributes to the symposium as a whole.
Journal Article
Should the Muslim President become a constitutional convention in Indonesia? Based on constitutional debates about Islam and state, and the constitutional practice
Since Soekarno to Joko Widodo, all of Indonesia's presidents have been Muslims. This practice is based on Dicey's theory of constitutional conventions, i.e. rules of conduct that can persist over time and gradually gain persuasive power before becoming mandatory. Is this a reasonable assumption? Furthermore, should a Muslim President be a constitutional convention? This article employs socio-legal studies in the form of law in context, a historical approach to the constitution-making debate and a practical approach to Indonesian political reality. The study's findings indicate that having a Muslim President as a constitutional convention is appropriate not only in terms of long-standing customs and practices but also as a resolution to the constitutional debate on Islam and the state, particularly the religious requirements for the President. As a constitutional convention, the Muslim President is not the law in the strict sense that it is binding and enforceable in court. Instead, it is a positive morality, ethics, and comprehension that serves as a moral guide for state officials and politicians. The Constitutional Convention in the form of a Muslim President, as well as the appointment of state offices taking religious proportionality into account, is an informal accommodation in the division of power in the design of the Indonesian constitutional system that takes into account the factors of Indonesia's plural and potentially divided society. As a result, the convention improves Indonesia's integration function.
Journal Article
Elite non-cooperation in polarized democracies: Constitution-making deferral, the entry referendum and the seeds of the Chilean failure
This article extends the study of the shortcomings of the constitution-making design that contributed to the failure of the Chilean process by addressing a largely overlooked aspect: the 2020 entry referendum. By placing two competing constitution-making models on the ballot, the political elites delegated to the voters a highly conflictual aspect of the process design that prevented cooperation among them. While some political parties approached the disagreements placed on the ballot as an opportunity to reopen discussions already settled by the 2019 Agreement, others interpreted the move as a cancellation of the political insurance contained in the Agreement. This exacerbated the existing polarization among political elites and imperiled prospects for the success of the process.
Journal Article