Economic Analysis of Constitutions

Abstract

Dennis Mueller's Constitutional Democracy and Robert Cooter's The Strategic Constitution have been written to fill a great need for basic general textbooks on the economic analysis of constitutional structures. These books aim to provide a general framework for analyzing how new constitutional structures might affect the conduct of politicians and the performance of government. Research in this area is new and growing rapidly. So it is exciting to find in these two books the first bold efforts to synthesize and present the new analytical methodology at a level suitable for an advanced undergraduate course. But these efforts must be called bold because, in this rapidly growing research area, there is not yet much consensus about the basic organizing paradigms and principles of political economics. So it is perhaps inevitable that these books will inspire controversy and criticism, as other scholars such as myself find that our favorite topics have been neglected. Yet the only way that we can arrive at a consensus about these organizing principles is through the writing of books such as these, where the authors do the work of trying to organize our new field, each building on the strengths and critiques of earlier efforts. Thus, although I find shortcomings in these books, I want to advocate the importance of their political questions and the appropriateness of their economic methodology. In Part I of this essay, I introduce some of the basic questions of constitutional analysis and show the importance of work in this area as one of the major new developments in social theory. In Part II, I explain why the methods of economic theory are particularly appropriate and useful for such constitutional analysis. In Part III, I try to follow Cooter and Mueller in sketching some of the most important results of economic analysis of constitutional structures, but I find my