Constitution

About: Constitution is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 37828 publications have been published within this topic receiving 435603 citations.

Conceptual Change and the Constitution

Abstract: The linguistic and conceptual dimension of the founding of America are examined in this book. Historians and political scientists analyze political discourse from the Revolution to ratification and suggest that out of the arguments and debates of the period came the American Constitution.

Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain: Propriety, property and prudence: David Hume and the defence of the Revolution

Abstract: The publication of the History of England finally established Hume's reputation as a Tory. The Whiggery of George III's reign could probably have survived the effects of his attack on reason, which had destroyed the epistemological foundations on which its theories of natural rights and contract depended. But, in what Hume called ‘the historical age’, it was much less easy to ignore an assault on Whig historiography which was not only intellectually devastating but was set out in a work which was becoming a bestseller at home and abroad. The History of England had destroyed the credibility of traditional claims that England was a country which possessed an ancient constitution whose principles had been periodically reaffirmed and perfected in the course of a long and continuous history. So far as the history of the modern age was concerned, Hume had drawn on Harrington and Clarendon to develop a strikingly subtle account of the catastrophes of the Civil War. It had taken place, he argued, in a country which had entered its post-feudal age but had not yet entered the age of commerce. It was the story of a court and parliament engulfed by Arminian superstition and Puritan enthusiasm and a country dominated by a gentry which had been freed from the bondage of feudal tenures but lacked the political understanding needed to secure their property and avoid the quicksands of religious zealotry.

Constitutional safeguards against centralization in federal states: An international cross-section analysis

Abstract: This paper contains an international cross-section analysis of the share of central government expenditure in total government expenditure for a sample of about 50 countries and a subsample of 23 industrial countries in 1989–91. The expenditure shares, their changes and the unexplained residuals for each country are reported in Table 1. As the analysis demonstrates, the share of central government is significantly lower, if income per capita and the country's area are large and if it is a federal state. The explanatory power of the equation rises considerably if the binary dummy for federalism is replaced by quantitative constitutional variables. The most powerful single explanatory variable is the age of the constitutional court in the complete sample or the constitutional court's independence of union institutions in the sample of industrial countries. The equation's explanatory power (adjusted for degrees of freedom) can be raised by allowing also for the degree of control which provincial institutions have over the constitution and over the second chamber and by taking into account whether an increase in federal tax rates requires a popular referendum. Other types of constitutional referenda and the relative age of the federal constitution do not seem to matter. Among the federal states, the share of central government is much larger than predicted in the United States and Mexico, and it is much smaller than predicted in Argentina and Canada. The constitutional variables are particularly helpful in explaining the relatively small share of central government in Switzerland, Malaysia, Germany and Austria. The last section draws conclusions for the design of constitutions with some special applications to the European Union.

The Year of the Woman? Candidates, Votes and the 1992 Elections

Abstract: The struggle for political power has been long and difficult for women in the United States. The barriers to participation in politics have been both legal and cultural, overt and subtle. In colonial America there were few direct limits on women's participation. However, the combination of franchise restrictions based on property ownership and the overwhelming propensity for property to be held in a man's name meant that few women participated in electoral politics as either voters or officeholders.' In one of the great ironies in American political history, the war for national independence led directly to the overt disenfranchisement of women in the United States. The national constitution left the determination of voter eligibility to the newly formed states. The revolution, with its emphasis on political rights, created pressure for moving away from property-based eligibility for suffrage. In being forced in the writing of their constitutions and their voting laws to confront de jure property-based restrictions, states also had to confront the de facto prohibi-

What If Madison Had Won? Imagining a Constitutional World of Legislative Supremacy

Abstract: Identifying the proper degree of federal supremacy and the best means of building it into the constitutional structure were central concerns for many members of the founding generation. At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison proposed granting Congress the power to veto state legislation. Madison’s “negative” was intended to connect Congress and the states in a single compound legislature, giving Congress the power either to veto or to ratify by silence the acts of state legislatures. The negative failed to gain the approval of the convention delegates, however, and they instead chose to build federal supremacy into the Constitution via the judiciary-centered mechanisms of the Supremacy Clause and Article III. This essay asks what would have happened if Madison’s negative had carried the day, and the Constitution had implemented federal supremacy by way of a legislative rather than a judicial device. One potential answer is that the negative should be understood as the functional equivalent of modern preemption doctrine. Had the negative been incorporated into the Constitution in 1787, however, the combined force of the negative’s distinctive characteristics might well have led not to a stronger union but to forceful resistance to federal power by diverse state legislatures in a variety of circumstances. Two nineteenth-century case studies illustrate this point: the controversy over the Bank of the United States, and the debate over Congress’s power to supplant state legislation in the area of interstate commerce. In contrast to Madison’s and many modern commentators’ understanding of the negative as a highly centralizing mechanism, these case studies show that the negative would likely have led to fragmentation and disintegration between the federal center and the state peripheries long before the antebellum sectional crisis.