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Stability of Constitutions
Author(s) -
KULTTI KLAUS,
MIETTINEN PAAVO
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
journal of public economic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.809
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1467-9779
pISSN - 1097-3923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9779.2009.01434.x
Subject(s) - majority rule , constitution , casual , mathematical economics , voting , stability (learning theory) , rule of law , economics , law , computer science , political science , politics , machine learning
Constitution is a pair of rules ( s , S ) that are used in a voting situation. The rule s is used to vote about the existing alternatives and the rule S is used to vote about changing the rule s to some other rule s ′ . We consider what kind of constitutions are likely to emerge as prominent ones if the constitutions contain more than just two rules. In a constitution that contains any number of rules the n th rule is used to decide about the n − 1 th rule. We define a notion of stability for the constitutions and show that all stable constitutions roughly contain the same rule from n = 2 onwards. This is one explanation to the casual observation that the constitutions have usually only two rules.