On the Inevitability of Divided Government and Improbability of a Complete Separation of Powers

Roger Congleton

No 13-04, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: This paper provides a tightly written overview and modest extension of the constitutional exchange and evolution model developed in Perfecting Parliament and uses that approach to analyze the division of authority that one would expect to see in contempo-rary constitutional governments. The analysis suggests that constitutions tend to be written, based on the king and council template, and buttressed by a more or less independent court system. Moreover, it suggests that constitutions change at the margin through time as constitutional bargaining takes place. This suggests that a complete separation of power is unlikely to be observed in the long run. Empirical evidence developed from the IAEP data base is consistent with these predictions.

Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2013-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent ... =econ_working-papers (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: On the inevitability of divided government and improbability of a complete separation of powers (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wvu:wpaper:13-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Feng Yao ().