Securing constitutional government: The perpetual challenge

Abstract

Deepening our understanding of the conditions that make constitutional government possible thus remains an intellectual task of the highest priority. In the past two decades, scholars have done a tremendous amount of work in this regard. My aim in this article is to make a modest contribution along these lines. I argue specifically that nations achieve constitutional government in the sense used in this article to the extent that they realize the following conditions: (1) prevalence of this particular conception of constitutional government as a dominant ideology; (2) an official constitution in written or customary form that adopts this conception of constitutional government; (3) an institutional matrix that sustains the official constitution and translates it into the experience of the people; and (4) a healthy economy that supports the institutional foundation of constitutional government. It is immediately evident that the third and fourth conditions are interdependent, each being a cause of the other. There is nothing unusual in nature or in culture about reciprocal causation. However, it raises important questions about prospects for breaking and reversing vicious cycles that grip countries whose economic conditions undermine institutions in ways that cause further economic decline. I consider some of these questions and propose that the integration of these countries into the market economy and hence into the liberal constitutional order is an unqualified good for both the industrialized democracies and the Third World