third-party enforcement. It is more important that consti-tutional law represents the conventions accepted in a soci-ety, and that societal order is coordinated around theseconventions. A “dualist” understanding views constitu-tions as frameworks within which other politics and insti-tutions operate. They establish second-order rules thatmust be followed when making more specific laws.

By constraining rulers, constitutions aim to protectcitizens’ rights. When a constitution stipulates judicialreview, citizens can petition courts to invalidate laws thatviolate constitutional principles. Although, as with theunwritten British constitution, not all provisions are judi-cially enforceable, they may nonetheless serve as focalpoints for legal interpretation and political debate, as wellas indicators of which government interventions will beaccepted by citizens.

A constitution serves, in some sense, to codify exist-ing social relations. Constitutional design, therefore, isconstrained by internal and external power dynamics.Resulting agreements reflect these relationships ratherthan pure legal ideals. As a result, underrepresentedgroups continue to be excluded, unless they gain influenceby extraconstitutional means.

Russell Hardin (1999) sees constitutions more asmodels of mutual advantage than as binding contracts. Itis usually in the best interest of all parties to uphold therules that maintain order within their society. There arerelatively few occasions when it would be more difficult tofollow existing rules than to renegotiate the terms of aconstitution.

Those rare circumstances on which recoordination isless costly for society are constitutional moments(Ackerman 1991). Changes in power alignments, in rela-tion to internal politics or external influence, may neces-sitate a change in the substance of a constitution. Thesemoments may involve major amendment to an existingconstitution, as in the post–Civil War United States, orthey may require a complete overhaul of the constitution,as in South Africa following the inclusion of the blackpopulation as full citizens in the 1990s. At these times,questions of legitimacy arise because the constitutionalauthors have not been elected by a process representingthe new social contract, and may not represent the peoplewho will be bound by the new document. If a new consti-tution is to remain a stable set of rules for the polity, itmust represent a credible commitment by citizens andleaders who will not have an incentive to override or rene-gotiate it, or resort to violence. Such constitutionalmoments may arise in the context of postwar reconstruc-tion, independence movements, domestic upheaval, orunion of existing polities. In each situation, citizensencounter distributional gains and losses reflecting socie-tal change.

SEE ALSO Judicial Review; Locke, John

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Ackerman, Bruce. 1991. Foundations. Vol. 1 of We the People.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hardin, Russell. 1999. Liberalism, Constitutionalism, andDemocracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Locke, John. [1690] 1988. Two Treatises of Government. Ed.Peter Laslett. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mark Axelrod

CONSTITUTIONSConstitutions can be defined as a set of rules that aim atregulating the channels of access to principal governmentpositions, the allocation of powers among differentbranches of government, and the rights of citizens. Mostconstitutions also include rules establishing procedures fortheir own amendment and the conditions under whichconstitutional provisions can be suspended.

Nearly all countries in the contemporary world havewritten constitutions, often identified as the “fundamen-tal law.” Even for these countries, however, it would bemisleading to restrict the constitution to a single docu-ment so named. Some of the rules that create the struc-tures of government and delimit their authority are alsocontained in statute law (such as laws establishing thejurisdiction and powers of governmental departments orindependent agencies) and in judicial decisions (such asthe rulings of a constitutional court) that are not codifiedin a single document. In addition, there are alwaysunwritten conventions that regulate the behavior of repre-sentatives and citizens, particularly in areas where writtenrules are silent or unclear. Moreover, most parts of a con-stitution can be composed of unwritten conventions, as isthe case of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Israel.

Constitutions generally attempt to prevent the arbi-trary use of state power. But there is a wide variation in thedegree to which state authorities effectively abide by theconstitution. Rulers are more likely to observe a constitu-tion that emerged out of a democratically elected bodyrepresenting a plurality of political forces. They are alsolikely to comply with the constitution when citizens agreeon the authority of the constitution as a set of impartialprocedures for the resolution of conflicts. This consensus,however, is often lacking when societies are divided byoverlapping cleavages of an economic, religious, or ethnicnature.

Constitutions that are at least minimally enforced areessential for the existence and legitimacy of democratic

Constitutions

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regimes. Citizens would not be free to criticize the govern-ment and keep its decisions in check without basic consti-tutional rules guaranteeing freedom of expression andproviding remedies against arbitrary state action. Trulycompetitive elections could not exist without constitu-tional rules guaranteeing freedom of assembly and orga-nization.

There is great variation in the way constitutionsorganize a democratic regime. Constitutional democraciescan be presidential, if the chief of government is elected bythe people for a fixed term, or parliamentary, if he or sheis elected by the assembly and responsible to the legislativemajority. Legislative assemblies can be unicameral orbicameral. States can be unitary or federal. Most contem-porary constitutions establish independent courts respon-sible for interpreting the constitution. Constitutionalcourts, however, vary in organization, composition, andpowers. Finally, while the majority of constitutionsinclude amendment rules that attempt to make constitu-tional reforms more difficult to pass than ordinary laws,these rules can be relatively flexible or extremely rigid.

In the twenty-first century constitutions are implic-itly or explicitly central to some of the most importantresearch fields in social sciences. Constitutions and theirvarious designs are considered to have a crucial impact onthe stability and quality of democracy, on economic pol-icy and economic performance, and on the rate of policychange in political regimes.

SEE ALSO Authority

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Dahl, Robert. 1996. Thinking About Democratic Constitutions.In Political Order: NOMOS XXXVIII, ed. Ian Shapiro andRussell Hardin, 175–206. New York: New York UniversityPress.

Elster, Jon, and Rune Slagstad. 1988. Constitutionalism andDemocracy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Ferejon, John, Jack Rakove, and Jonathan Riley, eds. 2001.Constitutional Culture and Democratic Rule. Cambridge,U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Hardin, Russell. 1989. Why a Constitution? In The FederalistPapers and the New Institutionalism, ed. Bernard Grofmanand Donald Wittman, 100–120. New York: Agathon Press.

Vogdanor, Vernon, ed. 1988. Introduction. In Constitutions inDemocratic Politics, 1–13. Aldershot, U.K.: Gower PublishingCompany.

Weingast, Barry R. 1997. The Political Foundations ofDemocracy and the Rule of Law. American Political ScienceReview 91 (2): 245–263.

Gabriel L. Negretto

CONSTRAINED CHOICEConstrained choice occurs when an economic agent mustdetermine the optimal combination of choice variables(given some relationship between combinations of thosevariables and payoffs) in the face of a constraint limitingthe set of feasible combinations for those variables avail-able to the agent. For instance, a consumer seeks to choosethe combination within his or her means of consumptiongoods and services that maximizes welfare. More specifi-cally, if C1 and C2 are the goods for which the consumermust choose the optimal combination, the consumer’sproblem is to maximize utility (U(C1,C2)) given a budgetconstraint: p1*C1 + p2*C2 ≤ M, where p1 and p2 are theprices of the two goods and M is the consumer’s overallincome or purchasing power.

The concept of constrained choice has been extendedboth theoretically and empirically to more elaborate set-tings. It arises naturally when agents must make forward-looking decisions or when agents are uncertain. Forinstance, life cycle models of saving and consumptionfocus on the challenge presented to agents who must max-imize discounted lifetime utility given the constraintsimposed by current and future income, and prices andopportunities to save or borrow. Agents may face uncer-tainty in terms of future income and prices, as well as thereturns to savings. The simple budget constraint posedmust then be recast in intertemporal terms in a fashionthat reflects the impact of per period saving or borrowing,as well as uncertainty regarding future income flows,returns to saving, and prices. A common way of approach-ing this is the value function method, which essentiallyreduces the rather complex intertemporal problem to aseries of two-period problems.

The concept of constrained choice has also beenextended to other behavioral settings, such as joint deci-sion-making. For example, household bargaining modelsattempt to capture a household’s members’ efforts to max-imize their personal utility from the consumption ofgoods and services, given a limit to overall household pur-chasing power. The household bargaining example alsospeaks to alternative approaches to choice. For instance,much of game theory studies interactive decision-making.This approach focuses on the constraints placed on anagent’s decision-making by other agents’ likely responsesto his or her decisions. Thus the agent does not necessar-ily face a static, internal (to him- or herself ) constraint asin the examples previously presented, but other agents’likely reactions to the agent’s behavior, and theirresponses’ implications for the agent’s own payoff func-tion, effectively constrain his or her behavior.

SEE ALSO Choice in Economics

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Constrained Choice