Dynamics and Stability of Constitutions, Coalitions, and Clubs
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Acemoglu_Dynamics and.pdf
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Author(s)
Acemoglu, Daron
Egorov, Georgy
Sonin, Konstantin
Date Issued
June 2012
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Acemoglu, Daron et al. "Dynamics and Stability of Constitutions, Coalitions, and Clubs." American Economic Review 102, 4 (June 2012): 1446-76.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
A central feature of dynamic collective decision-making is that the rules that govern procedures for
future decision-making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current
decisions. For example, current constitutional change must take into account how the new constitution
paves the way for further changes in laws and regulations. We develop a general framework for the
analysis of this class of dynamic problems. Under relatively natural acyclicity assumptions, we provide
a complete characterization of dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and determine
conditions for their uniqueness. The explicit characterization we provide highlights two intuitive features
of dynamic collective decision-making: (1) a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of
alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently many members of the society; (2) efficiency-
enhancing changes are often resisted because of further social changes that they will engender. Finally,
we apply this framework to the analysis of the dynamics of political rights in a society with different
types of extremist views.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.102.4.1446
