Some constitutional scholars suggest that the US Constitution stands as one of the oldest yet least changed national constitutions in part because Americans’ tendency to “revere” the Constitution has left them unwilling to consider significant changes to the document. Several recent studies support aspects of this claim, but no study establishes a direct link between individuals’ respect for the Constitution and their reluctance to amend it. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design of Zink and Dawes (2016) across two survey experiments. The key difference in our experiments is we include measures of respondents’ propensity to revere the Constitution, which in turn allows us to more directly test whether constitutional veneration translates into resistance to amendment. Our results build on Zink and Dawes’s findings and show that, in addition to institutional factors, citizens’ veneration of the Constitution can act as a psychological obstacle to constitutional amendment.

For nearly half a century democratic citizens have been preoccupied with the search for self-respect. Though classical liberalism places this question outside its purview and many commentators see in such a concern evidence of a “thin-skinned” political culture, John Rawls has recently provided serious arguments for the political relevance of self-respect. These arguments, we claim, are deeply indebted to the social and political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose deep albeit underexamined influence on Rawls shows itself both in Rawls's conception of the social problem as well as in his solution to it. Rawls's belief that the provision of self-respect can solve the social problem is uniquely Rousseauan not only because of its emphasis on equality but also because it suggests political life can and must reconcile the conflicts between self and society at a fundamental level.

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls describesself-respect as “perhaps the most important” socialprimary good, and self-respect figures prominently in §82, thecritical section where he distills his justification for the mostcontroversial aspect of his conception of justice, the lexical priority ofliberty. As such, his account of self-respect has drawn considerableattention, especially from critics, who argue that self-respect is not asufficiently compelling interest to justify the precedence of liberty. Yet,while much of the existing research has focused on the justificatoryfunction of self-respect, it has mostly neglected the fact that Rawlsinvokes self-respect for another purpose in §82: his argument forstability, in which he claims that his conception of justice will instill inindividuals a desire to act from a sense of justice. Thus, even ifRawls’s account of self-respect is insufficient to justify hisconception of justice, it nonetheless plays a crucial role in Theory insofaras it addresses the moral psychology necessary for reinforcing the justicemotive, a matter of central importance for maintaining stability in aliberal democratic society.

Although contemporary Americans take it for granted that a “constitution” is a written document, written constitutions were almost unprecedented at America's founding. James Wilson, one of the most significant yet overlooked of America's founders, offers a comprehensive theory of America's written constitution. Wilson argues that the written-ness of the U.S. Constitution serves two essential functions. As an initial matter, it memorializes the primacy of liberty by announcing that the authority of government derives only from a free people. Perhaps more importantly, however, the written constitution uplifts and refines the character of its citizens, and thus helps to constitute a people. A review of Wilson's writings and speeches reveals how, even in a rights-centric political order, the written constitution helps to cultivate moderate and civic-minded citizens without diminishing the fundamental importance of individual rights.