Self-Enforcing Constitutions: With an Application to Democratic Stability In America's First Century
本文提出自我执行宪法的理论，并应用于美国早期历史，发现除奴隶制问题外，美国宪法民主在1800年左右已能自我执行，但奴隶制危机多次威胁国家，内战终结了奴隶制作为政治分歧的根源，使自我执行民主在1877年妥协后重新出现。
Most students of constitutions focus on normative questions or study the effects of particular constitutional provisions. This article falls into a third and much smaller tradition that attempts to study what makes some constitutions more likely to survive. This article develops a theory of self-enforcing constitutions and then applies it to the early United States. But for the issue of slavery, constitutional democracy in the United States was self-enforcing by about 1800. Nonetheless, crises over slavery threatened the nation on numerous occasions. The civil war decisively ended slavery as a source of political division, allowing self-enforcing democracy (for white males) to reemerge following the Compromise of 1877.