Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, The Economic Effects of Constitutions

Excerpt

The field of constitutional political economy focuses on the institutions that are defined in constitutions, and the economic and political consequences of these institutions. If defined broadly, constitutional political economy can claim all of the public choice literature, both theoretical and empirical. The vast literature on the simple majority rule, for example, gives predictions about the consequences of stipulating this voting rule as the parliamentary voting rule. If, on the other hand, we define constitutional political economy more narrowly as the set of studies that explicitly deals with the contents of constitutions, then research in constitutional political economy can be said to have been predominantly theoretical, both normative, what ought to go into a constitution, and positive, for example, the consequences of federalist structure. But very few studies in constitutional political economy, so defined, have been empirical. This important book by Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini seems likely to change that and launch the empirical study of constitutions. …