Constitutional Constraints, Organizational Preferences, and Qualitative Methods: A Replication and Reassessment of North and Weingast

Abstract

Douglass North and Barry Weingast’s 1989 article, “Constitutions and Commitment” (“N&W”) is a landmark contribution to a plethora of social science literatures. The authors’ broad argument, namely that the balanced constitutional settlement following the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England was the primary cause of the Financial Revolution that followed, is a staple of countless comparative politics, economics, and legal studies courses. Yet despite the substantial attention that the study has garnered, to this author’s knowledge there exists no study that assesses the validity of N&W’s claims on their own empirical terms: namely, through a qualitative replication and examination of the sources upon which their contribution is based. Given recent drives to improve the transparency and replicability of qualitative research, particularly on the part of the American Political Science Association Council, this paper replicates, assesses, and extends N&W, and constructs a transparency appendix in accordance with the “Active Citation” standard to encourage independent engagement and assessment of the arguments made here. Part II provides an overview of N&W’s argument. Part III discusses alternative approaches/critiques of N&W, and argues that the most relevant alternative accounts emphasize the organizational preferences of Parliamentary interests following the Glorious Revolution over the constitutional constraints that play a more central role in N&W. Part IV details the results of this replication, discusses the potential problems of relying exclusively on secondary source evidence (as N&W do), and concludes that N&W correctly interpreted the evidence they extract. However, I find that no more than a couple of citations clearly speak to the causal mechanism underlying N&W’s constitutional constraints thesis. Part V uncovers further evidence, exclusively drawn from the very same secondary sources, to adjudicate between N&W’s hypothesis and the organizational preferences hypothesis introduced in Part III. I find that N&W’s sources more strongly support the organizational preferences theory, and thus conclude that while N&W do not commit errors of misinterpretation, they do engage in sins of omission. Finally, Part VI concludes.