Creating a Constitution : Law, Democracy, and Growth in Ancient Athens Hardback
by Federica Carugati
Hardback
Description
A comprehensive account of how the Athenian constitution was created—with lessons for contemporary constitution-buildingWe live in an era of constitution-making.
More than half of the world's constitutions have been drafted in the past half-century.
Yet, one question still eludes theorists and practitioners alike: how do stable, growth-enhancing constitutional structures emerge and endure?
In Creating a Constitution, Federica Carugati argues that ancient Athens offers a unique laboratory for exploring this question. Because the city-state was reasonably well-documented, smaller than most modern nations, and simpler in its institutional makeup, the case of Athens reveals key factors of successful constitution-making that are hard to flesh out in more complex settings. Carugati demonstrates that the institutional changes Athens undertook in the late fifth century BCE, after a period of war and internal strife, amounted to a de facto constitution.
The constitution restored stability and allowed the democracy to flourish anew.
The analysis of Athens's case reveals the importance of three factors for creating a successful constitution: first, a consensus on a set of shared values capable of commanding long-term support; second, a self-enforcing institutional structure that reflects those values; and, third, regulatory mechanisms for policymaking that enable tradeoffs of inclusion to foster growth without jeopardizing stability. Uniquely combining institutional analysis, political economy, and history, Creating a Constitution is a compelling account of how political and economic goals that we normally associate with Western developed countries were once achieved through different institutional arrangements.
Information
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Out of stock
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:248 pages, 16 b/w illus. 1 map.
- Publisher:Princeton University Press
- Publication Date:20/08/2019
- Category:
- ISBN:9780691195636
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:248 pages, 16 b/w illus. 1 map.
- Publisher:Princeton University Press
- Publication Date:20/08/2019
- Category:
- ISBN:9780691195636
