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The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of the Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Barry R. Weingast
Barry R. Weingast*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

This paper develops a game-theoretic approach to the problem of political officials' respect for political and economic rights of citizens. It models the policing of rights as a coordination problem among citizens, but one with asymmetries difficult to resolve in a decentralized manner. The paper shows that democratic stability depends on a self-enforcing equilibrium: It must be in the interests of political officials to respect democracy's limits on their behavior. The concept of self-enforcing limits on the state illuminates a diverse set of problems and thus serves as a potential basis for integrating the literature. The framework is applied to a range of topics, such as democratic stability, plural societies, and elite pacts. The paper also applies its lessons to the case of the Glorious Revolution in seventeenth-century England.

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American Political Science Review , Volume 91 , Issue 2 , June 1997 , pp. 245 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1997

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