INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONS AND SIMILARITIES

The last case to be analyzed is the American transition to constitutional democracy. As in the case of Japan, this case also involves another continent’s culture. It also involves a somewhat different catalyst for constitutional exchange, the absence of an obvious king, a war of independence, and differences in the timing and details of individual reforms. The emergence of liberal democracy in the United States of America is nonetheless consistent with the models of constitutional reform developed in Part I.

The transition to parliamentary democracy in the territories that became the United States began very early, but took an unusually long time to be completed. The first more or less democratic constitution in North America was the third charter for the Virginia colony, which was drafted in London and implemented in Virginia between 1619 and 1622. It called for a bicameral legislature, with one appointed chamber (the chamber of state) and another directly elected chamber (the chamber of burgesses). Initially, the first chamber was composed largely of English nobles who had made the trip to Virginia to look after their investments in the Virginia Company. Members of the second chamber were elected by the freemen (property owners) of the colony. The second chamber is of particular interest for the purposes of this book and for constitutional history, because elections for that chamber were based on unusually broad suffrage by the standards of world history. European suffrage would not reach similar levels for two more centuries. The transition to adult suffrage, however, took two or three times longer in the United States than in the other case studies. The colonies that became the United States all had relatively broad male suffrage by 1700, but the United States did not adopt women’s suffrage until 1920, about the same time as this was done in Europe’s parliamentary democracies.