Articles of Confederation: a first constitution
        Adopted 1777
        Ratified unanimously by 1781
        A unicameral legislature, with no formal executive or judicial branches
        Government under the Articles was responsible for national defense
        National defense was paid for by "requisition" to the states, where requisitions are like taxes, but without an enforcement mechanism. Payment was essentially voluntary.

National defense is a "collective good," which means that it is
        Jointly supplied
        Non-excludable

Problems with the Articles of Confederation
        Unable to deal with foreign threats (enforce treaty, Spanish blockade, pirates)
        Unable to deal with Shays’s rebellion
        Unable to pay debts
        In general, unable to provide "collective goods"
        Why? No capacity to enforce cooperation in provision of collective goods.

This is an example of a collective action problem. See discussion in Shepsle & Bonchek, chapter 8, pp. 201-204.

 
 

Player A’s choice	Cooperate	Do not cooperate
Cooperate	1,1	-1,2
Do not cooperate	2,-1	0,0

Note the similarities of the problem of contributing requisitions to the government of the Articles for national defense and Hume’s Marsh-Draining Game (S&B, Display 8.1, p. 203)

Why government: the problem of cooperation
        A world without cooperation
        What about our market experiment?
        The simplest case: two person cooperation

Nature of unanimity in politics and markets
        Positive: everyone has a veto, (and you may want to use it)
        Negative: everyone has a veto, (but you and perhaps others may want something that someone will veto)

The basic structure of the Constitution:
        Federalism
        Separation of powers, and checks and balances
            These will be considered directly in Topic 4

A government with substantial, but limited powers:
        Article I, section 8 (read it carefully). Note the language for
        The power to raise revenue through taxation and borrowing
        The power to provide for the common defense by providing an army and a navy, declaring war
        The power to regulate commerce with other nations and among the states

Principles but compromise:
        Principles: The Federalist Papers (You are assigned #s 10 & 51 in Topic 4)
         Compromise:
                Virginia and New Jersey plans (Light, p. 43): Stronger vs. weaker government, the basis of representation
                The three fifths compromise

A republic but not a democracy:
        Representative government; No provision for direct election
        Limited franchise – as defined by the states

"The Beard thesis:" a class analysis of the Constitution (Light, p. 42-44)

Approving constitutions: A balance between unanimity and majority rule,
        Where unanimity is equivalent to allowing everyone a veto, and
        Supermajorities are equivalent to offering minorities a veto.

Ratification: Article VII:
        Unanimous consent of states represented in the convention
        Nine of thirteen state conventions (not legislatures)
                The ninth state had ratified by 1788, and the last by 1791

Amendment: Article V:
        2/3 of both houses or of the state legislatures to propose
        ¾ of the states or of state conventions to ratify
                Four possible permutations of the two possibilities
 
        All 27 amendments were proposed by Congress (though there have been 356 proposals for a national convention)
                and all but one ratified by the state legislatures
                Exception: 21^st Amendment

Ironically, the combination of the demand for a supermajority (such as ¾ of the states for ratification) with federalism provides a possibility for a minority of the population to ratify an amendment:
        The least populous three fourths of the states have had less than fifty percent of the population since 1850
        The figure as of the 1990 census was 40.3%

It is also possible for ¾ of the people to favor an amendment, but because of their distribution among states, not to prevail.

The Constitution set up many checks against each majority rule institution, and it never specified majority rule, but majority rule was implicitly the standard to be used in each multi-agent body.