Enumerating rights: more is not always better

Sheryl Ball, Chetan Dave and Stefan Dodds

Public Choice, 2023, vol. 196, issue 3, No 9, 403-425

Abstract: Abstract Contemporary political and policy debate rhetoric increasingly employs the language of ‘rights’: how they are assigned and what entitlements individuals in a society are due. While the obvious constitution design issues surround how rights enumeration affects the relationship between a government and its citizens, we instead analyze how rights framing impacts how citizens interact with each other. We design and implement a novel experiment to test whether social cooperation depends on the enumeration and positive or negative framing of the right of subjects to take a particular action. We find that when rights are framed positively, there exists an ‘entitlement effect’ that reduces social cooperation levels and crowds-out the tendency of individuals to act pro-socially.

Keywords: Constitutional design; Coase theorem; Framing; Preferences; Rights; Battle of the sexes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Working Paper: Enumerating Rights: More is Not Always Better (2019)
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DOI: 10.1007/s11127-023-01053-0

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