Constitutional Design Series

I just wrote a series of posts about Constitutional Design. I thought I’d crosspost it here as it might be of interest to Effective Altruists, particularly those interested in electoral reform and safeguarding liberal democracy. Constitutional design may also be interesting for exploring the idea of value lock-in.

Constitutional design is a subject that has always fascinated me. I think there are a lot of really interesting things to discuss and not much written about it right now.

It’s a subject that has become more important recently as norms have weakened and polarization has increased. When norms are strong and polarization is low, norms are used as substitution for poor constitutional design, and the big swings in elections ensure that the exact mechanisms for translating the popular view into government action isn’t too important. As norms have weakened, increasingly all that’s keeping countries afloat is their constitutional process. From my perspective, differing constitutional design accounts for much of the difference in experience between democratic countries right now. The far right is on the rise worldwide, but how exactly it has impacted a country is in large part a function of its constitutional mechanisms.

In this series, I’ll be covering what I see as the major choices and principles one should keep in mind when designing a democratic constitution. I’ll be coming at it mostly from a consequentialist perspective. This discussion will be quite theoretical - the sample size for constitutions is quite small, and I think there’s a lot to be gained via theoretical reasoning - but I hope to ground it in realism and examples. When talking about design choices, I’m usually going to give my opinion on which is best, but my goal is more to discuss the tradeoffs than to prescribe specific answers.

I have these pieces organized into chapters. I have tried to keep every piece as self-contained as possible, so reading an earlier one isn’t strictly necessary to read a later one, except where I state otherwise. Reading the chapters in order is also optional, this is just my recommendation. I bolded and italicized the pieces which I’m most proud of, although to be honest I’m quite proud of all of them.

Basic theoretical foundations:

• Politics As Rational Decision Theory, discussing the model of politicians and of voters that I’ll have in mind for the rest of the series and how this fits into democracy
• Accountability vs. Consensus, discussing the primary tradeoff in all of constitutional design.
• Perils of Poor Constitutional Design, discussing the goals I’ll be aiming for in designing a constitution, the problems I’m looking to avoid
• Law and Government, discussing the basic image of government and law

Basic structure of government:

• Why Legislature?
• The Executive and The Leader
• Non-Partisan Entities

Electoral Systems:

• Single-Member Electoral Systems
• Multi-Member Electoral Systems
• Party Candidate Selection

Mechanism design:

• Supermajority Requirements and Status Quo Bias
• Direct Democracy, covering petitions, referenda, sortition, etc.
• Regionalism

Information:

• Government Transparency
• Speech and Money, covering free speech, campaign finance, corruption and lobbying

Finer details:

• Terms, covering term lengths and term limits
• Parliamentary Democracy Procedure, covering prime minister selection and snap elections
• Legislature Structure and Procedure, covering things like optimal legislature size, committees, and debate
• Voting Laws

And finally:

• Local Constitutional Design, discussing which of the things I talk about apply on the local level

Hope you’ll read on!