In defense of the Articles of Confederation and the contribution mechanism as a means of government finance: A general comment on the literature

I attempt to dispel several widely-held myths regarding government finance under the Articles of Confederation, some of which were reiterated in Dougherty and Cain (1997). I defend the contribution mechanism as a method of government finance that is superior to direct taxation by the federal government, and present evidence contradicting the belief that revenue collections under the Articles were poor. A proper comparison is with alternatives at that time, such as state tax collections and the federal governments own tax collections under the new U.S. Constitution, both of which were lower than the collection rate from states under the Articles.     

Marginal cost sharing and the Articles of Confederation

Between 1781 and 1789 the American states attempted to share the costs of national, public goods through a system of requisitions. This paper uses a simple public goods analysis to show why rational states would not share costs as intended by the Articles of Confederation. This normative argument illustrates a potential flaw in the constitutional design of the Articles and provides insight into the decline of the American Confederation.     

The Iroquois Confederation Constitution: An Analysis

The Iroquois Confederation was not an influence on the U.S.Constitution, but it is worthy of study as an independentlydeveloped political system with the oldest surviving constitutionin North America. A systematic institutional analysis of theGreat Binding Law, the orally transmitted constitution of theConfederation, reveals, among other things: tribal inequalitydespite their formal equality under a unanimity rule; a highlevel of responsiveness despite a nondemocratic, elitist methodfor selecting leaders; many ancillary institutions for achievinga traditional form of consensus rather than simple majorityrule; two means of elevating men to the Confederation Council,each a paradoxical blend of the pre political and the post-traditional;the first use of a formal amendment process in constitutionalhistory; and an underlying "code of imperialism" that, togetherwith the second method of selecting Confederation Council members,transformed a defensive alliance into a potent actor in NorthAmerican history. Overall, the Confederation institutionallyapproximated an Aristotelian "mixed regime" which, despite itscreation under circumstances the Iroquois describe in Hobbesianterms, was quite libertarian.     

Toward a Constitutional School for American Public Administration

A central tenet of The Federalist is that good government depends on good administration. Two hundred and twenty‐three years have passed since Publius began writing this extraordinary text. As American democratic institutions have grown larger and more complex than what the founders ever imagined, many of the ideas expressed in The Federalist remain as relevant today as when James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay first advanced them in 1787. The author argues that public administration should move toward a constitutional school that would connect the U.S. Constitution with all aspects of American public administration theory and practice. While the author readily acknowledges this new school’s apparent defects, its most important contribution recognizes that the American Constitution matters, and indeed should serve as a lodestar for our entire field.     

Organization and Management of Executive Departments: Executive Summary

From the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, the executive department has been the primary vehicle through which the government of the United States has administered its programs. Their organization and effectiveness are therefore matters that demand constant attention.     

Federalism, Republicanism, and the Northwest Ordinance

The Northwest Ordinance, enacted by the Congress of the Confederationon 13 July 1787, addressed in its own way the two crises facingthe Framers in Philadelphia: the crisis of the Union and thecrisis of republican government. It gave government to the NorthwestTerritory, which had been created for the sake of the Unionand with an eye to the security of republicanism. That territorywas destined to be a matrix of new states, equal members ofthe Union and republican in form. The working out of those principles,commanded by the Declaration and foreshadowing the Constitution,is traced from Jefferson's plan of 1784 to the Ordinance of1787. The uncultivated and intractable character of the frontiersman,making his attachment to the Union and his capacity for self-governmentdubious, presented a special problem. It is seen how the NorthwestOrdinance, establishing government, procuring certain socialand economic conditions, and inducing proper habits and opinions,sought to make the expansion of the Union an extension of republicanism.     

Defending the Articles of Conferation: A Response to Sobel

A fundamental mystery of the Articles of Confederation is why the statescontributed sizeable resources to the confederation government when theywere allegedly caught in a collective action problem. In a recent article,Russel Sobel denies the collective action problem and suggests that ourresearch on the incentive structure of the confederation contradicts theevidence. This note clarifies both of our arguments, introduces the typeof evidence that would determine whether national public goods weresub-optimally supplied, and explains why states contributed in a mannerthat is consistent with the evidence and with a deficient institutionaldesign.     

Fragmenting parchment and the winds of war: The Constitution of the United States, 1860–2004

The tension between Hobbesian and Lockeian perspectives on the origins and functions of the state was resolved decisively at Philadelphia in favor of the latter. Fourscore and seven years on from 1787, however, Abraham Lincoln’s resolve to save the Union rather than to preserve the Constitution launched a series of attacks by the executive and legislative branches, sustained by a complaisant judiciary, on the parchment so carefully crafted by the republic’s Founders. This essay documents the federal government’s exploitation of security threats, from the Civil War to the War on Terror, to dismantle constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.     

Political Culture and the Pattern of Congressional Politics Under the Articles of Confederation

This article brings a broad tradition of sociocultural analysis,commonly identified with Louis Hartz, Bernard Bailyn, SeymourMartin Lipset, and Daniel J. Elazar, to bear in understandingthe pattern and character of congressional politics in the firstAmerican national government. This approach, centering on thestudy of political culture and the role of ideas in shapingthe performance of institutions, attempts to place values, orconflicts between alternative value systems, at the heart ofdiscussions of political development and change in RevolutionaryAmerica. I deploy both traditional historical argument and quantitativeevidence to demonstrate that the three political subculturesdescribed by Elazar—moralistic in New England, individualisticin the Middle Atlantic states, and traditionalistic in the South—providethe basis for an explanation of factional divisions which appearedin the Congress of the Articles of Confederation.     

US Presidential Elections: Two Centuries of Constitutional Continuity and Political Change—With an Analysis of the Political Geography of Barack Obama's Re‐election Campaign

The system for electing the President of the United States remains essentially as it was prescribed in the Federal Constitution drafted in 1787. The individual 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) are accorded a number of votes in the (so‐called) Electoral College; each state's Electoral College vote is then attributed to the candidate gaining a plurality (most) of the popular vote in that state; and the candidate with a majority (50% + 1) of these aggregated Electoral College votes is declared the incoming president. What has changed have been the methods of nominating the candidates, chief of which are the political parties from the nineteenth century with their stage‐managed quadrennial conventions and the primary/caucus campaigns from the twentieth century which precede and now determine the formal nomination. President Obama's 2012 re‐election campaign showed both the crucial importance of the much‐maligned Electoral College in winning the presidency and the demographic divisions hidden in the larger American political landscape.     

Reality and historicity: economy and dialectics in Marxism ∗

On 1 July 1997, the Basil Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) will be enacted in accordance with the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. Articles 107 and 108 of the Basic Law, the so-called balanced budget and low tax policy articles, are the two most controversial articles of the Chapter on Economy. The manifest purpose of these two articles is to constrain the spending and taxing power of the HKSAR in order to prohibit elected members of the Legislative Council from turning Hong Kong into a welfare state, and they have been justified by some ostensibly using Buchanan's concept of fiscal constitution. This paper examines the justification and effects of incorporating elements of fiscal constitution in the Basic Law, focusing particularly on the income redistribution effect. The paper concludes that policy articles grounded on the philosophy of fiscal constitution should not have been included.     

六大理论新意 彰显时代特色——学习十七大新党章有感

党的十七大通过的《中国共产党章程（修正案）》,体现了党的十六大以来党的理论创新和实践发展的成果,体现了十七大报告确立的重大理论观点、重大战略思想、重大工作布署,对坚持和改善党的领导、加强和改进党的建设提出了明确要求,既保持了《中国共产党章程》的稳定性和连续性,又实现了与时俱进的先进性。     

The Crisis at the CBI

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) experienced a reputational crisis after a number of allegations of sexual harassment. Leading members of the organisation resigned and its resources were depleted. The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) attempted to fill the void. The organisation survived a confidence vote, but the result may be a permanently weakened organisation. Apart from the 2023 crisis, there are deeper structural problems in business representation.     

South Korean views on Japan's constitutional reform under the Abe government

In this Special Section, this article reviews South Korean views on Japan's ‘peace’ Constitution and the Abe government's attempts at constitutional reform. It identifies three different understandings among South Korean academics on why Japan is escalating attempts to revise the Constitution under the Abe government. An in-depth analysis demonstrates that all three perspectives pay specific attention to Japan's constitutional reform in relation to security policy changes. However, they differ in assessing the impact of Japan's constitutional reform on South Korea as well as how South Korea should deal with such a change. A minority opinion considers Japan's ‘remilitarisation’ through constitutional revision as conducive to South Korean security interests by increasing deterrence against North Korea, whereas the dominant opinion is that any attempt to revise the Constitution could be in and of itself a potential threat to South Korea's security due to a lack of trust attributed to unresolved historical conflicts between Korea and Japan. However, all three approaches pay hardly any attention to the positive role of Japan's peace Constitution while Japan's peace Constitution might provide a regional peace model in Northeast Asia.     

公民的基本权利与宪法保障

保障公民的基本权利是宪法最主要、最核心的价值。近代宪法是在保障公民基本权利的过程中产生的,保障公民的基本权利是宪法永恒的主题。基于经济、政治和文化的发展,我国要通过修宪和宪法解释工作进一步确认一些与中国社会发展和人们生活息息相关的必要的基本权利,并通过规范国家权力和加强司法救济等手段来确保公民基本权利的实现。     

坚持依法执政完善领导方式

依法执政,宪法是重心.宪法乃国家根本法,规定了最根本的制度,代表了党和人民最根本的利益.所以治国要以宪法为基础.依法执政,党本身要坚持在宪法和法律的范围内活动,全党同志都要牢固树立社会主义法治观念.     

Toward Making a Proper Space for the Individual in the Ethiopian Constitution

A symbolic, normative, and institutional investigation of the 1995 Ethiopian Constitution reveals that the individual is displaced and locked in the periphery as much of the socio-economic and political ecology of the state is occupied by Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (NNPs). The Constitution presents and makes NNPs authors, sovereigns and constitutional adjudicators by adopting a corporate conception of group rights. As this corporate conception of group rights permeate and structure the organization of the Ethiopian state and government, the individual is relegated in the constitutional order. In order to make the transition to constitutional democracy sustainable, it is argued that the Constitution should accommodate and ensure individual autonomy by adopting a collective conception of group rights. This offers both the normative basis and institutional safeguards to strike a proper equilibrium between group rights and individual rights.     

The Canadian constitutional amending formula: Bargaining in the past and the future

Public Choice - The amending formula of Canada's Constitution Act, 1982 is analysed and assessed, as are a variety of alternative formulae, some of which were actually proposed and then...     

The Covenantal Basis for the Development of Swiss Political Federalism: 1291-1848

This study argues that the modern political philosophy of federalismis directly linked to the Swiss Reformed idea of religious covenant,which was first formulated in the 1520s and 1530s by HeinrichBullinger in Zürich. Bullinger's concept of religious covenanthad roots both in the Old Testament and in the early federalideal and reality that had come out of the Swiss Middle Ages;it therefore had important social and political implicationsas well as theological meaning. During the sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries, this theological idea of federalism fedinto and helped to create the modern political concept of federalism,especially in the thought of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay and JohannesAlthusius. Political federalism became a reality in the Constitutionof the United States in the late eighteenth century. The Swissfederal Constitution of 1848 was instructed by the mature conceptof political federalism, by the Constitution of the United States,and by the long tradition of Swiss federalism. All of theseinfluences had some basis in the uniquely Swiss idea of religiouscovenant.     

Completing the Constitution: The Fourteenth Amendment and Constitutional Rights

Although the Fourteenth Amendment has been the vehicle for anumber of transformations in the protection of rights, therehas been no consensus on what it means. The amendment is sometimesheld to have revolutionized the Constitution, in effect replacingthe traditional federal system with a more national system.It is also argued that the amendment essentially reaffirmedthe prewar Constitution. The truth appears to lie with neitherside: the drafters of the amendment attempted to "complete theConstitution," neither to reform it radically, nor to reaffirmit simply. In doing so, they unwittingly followed in the tracksof the original "father of the Constitution," James Madison,who believed the original Constitution to be defective in importantways. Proper attention to the context and the structure of thetext of the amendment reveals just how the amendment was to"complete the Constitution." So examined, the amendment revealsitself to be a precisely stated, clearly drafted text, containinga number of new constitutional principles. Properly understood,the amendment affords constitutional protection for rights alreadypossessed in some sense, but therefore unprotected in the oldConstitution.