Self-Enforcing Constitutions: With an Application to Democratic Stability In America's First Century

Most students of constitutions focus on normative questions or study the effects of particular constitutional provisions. This article falls into a third and much smaller tradition that attempts to study what makes some constitutions more likely to survive. This article develops a theory of self-enforcing constitutions and then applies it to the early United States. But for the issue of slavery, constitutional democracy in the United States was self-enforcing by about 1800. Nonetheless, crises over slavery threatened the nation on numerous occasions. The civil war decisively ended slavery as a source of political division, allowing self-enforcing democracy (for white males) to reemerge following the Compromise of 1877.