Browsing by Subject "Public law"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Demagoguery and American constitutionalism
(2020-05-07) Zug, Charles Ulrich; Tulis, Jeffrey; Muirhead, Russell, 1965-; Jacobsohn, Gary J; Stauffer, Devin
Despite a renaissance in the study of demagoguery and related concepts like populism, scholars have said relatively little about the range of meanings that demagoguery can have when deployed in different ways, by different political figures, for the sake of different political ends. Since William Fennimore Cooper’s classic 1831 essay on the subject, almost every account of demagoguery in American political thought has described a form of rhetorical leadership that is essentially bad. In this view, demagoguery is defined at the outset as divisive and destabilizing leadership that appeals to what is worst in an audience at the expense of what is best for the sake of the leader’s own aggrandizement. Scholars working within this thought paradigm appear, as a consequence, to have been closed off from the more interesting possibilities that a less emphatically moralistic approach to the subject opens up. Curiously, these same possibilities seem to be intuitive for most scholars even though their implications have not been explored: the same writers and commentators who insist on a moralistic conception of demagoguery will also concede that rhetorical tactics traditionally associated with demagoguery, like appeals to the passions and settled opinions (or prejudices) of one’s audience, can be legitimate in special instances and when executed in a responsible way for the sake of a publicly beneficial end. This dissertation draws out and develops the intuition on which this concession is based. What are the factors and considerations that make the use of demagogic tactics plausibly legitimate in American politics, even though thoroughgoing demagoguery is acknowledged to be bad? Looking to the basic principles of American constitutional democracy, the dissertation proposes an evaluative framework for distinguishing the few instances in American politics where demagogic rhetorical tactics are justifiable from the overwhelming majority in which they are not. Its goal is to help us see the good in rhetorical leadership that we have previously dismissed as mere demagoguery, and to see what is harmful in rhetoric that we currently lack the tools to understand.
Power in text : extracting institutional relationships from natural language
(2018-09-14) Shaffer, Robert Bradley; Elkins, Zachary, 1970-; Jones, Bryan; Jessee, Stephen; Wilkerson, John
How do legislators allocate policy-making authority? At least in the legal context, distribution-of-power arrangements are usually articulated in written documents. Unfortunately, extracting these relationships is difficult, leading scholars to restrict themselves to studies of single policy areas or to a small set of high-visibility laws. In this project, I address this limitation through a neural network-based approach that extracts power relationships from legal language in a scalable, valid fashion. I then apply this approach to study institutional design in enacted US legislation. Substantively, I demonstrate that policy preferences of executive and legislative actors exert surprisingly little influence on formal institutional design choices. For all but the most politically salient laws, implementation arrangements are structured by the policy area and issue under consideration rather than elite political preferences. This argument - which would not have been possible to test without the measurement tools I develop - highlights both the importance of the tools I develop and the need for scalable measurement techniques in political science.
The politics of sovereignty : federalism in American political development
(2016-12) Ewing, Connor Maxwell; Tulis, Jeffrey; Jacobsohn, Gary J., 1946-; Levinson, Sanford V; Perry, H.W.; Brinks, Daniel M
The development of American federalism is a story of contested sovereignty, and those contests are fundamentally shaped by the evolving structures, relationships, and understandings of the constitutional order. This dissertation seeks to show how the American federal system is both cause and effect of political development. Even as it structures legal and political contestation, American federalism is shaped—even redefined—by such contestation. Central to the account of American federalism that I advance are two related arguments about the nature of the federal system. The first is that the Constitution’s definition of the state-federal relationship is structurally underdeterminate: while the Constitution constrains the set of permissible state-federal relationships, it fixes no single definition. Rather than establish a determinate division of state and national powers, the Constitution establishes a range of parameters for their relationship and sets forth the legal and political processes through which that relationship is contested, defined, and revised. As a result, the American federal system both shapes and is shaped by constitutionally structured politics. Developing an implication of this argument, the second argument holds that notions and definitions of sovereignty are structured relationally. Articulations of national power reciprocally define a category of state powers, just as invocation of local concerns over which states have authority reciprocally define national concerns over which the national government has authority. On this account federalism is both an independent and a dependent variable, an approach that shifts our focus from federalism and American political development to federalism in American political development. By foregrounding the underdeterminacy of the federal system and interrogating the constitutional construction it anticipates, we can glimpse the intertwined contingency and continuity of American constitutional development. This dissertation is broadly divided into two parts—the first theoretical, the second developmental—each of which consists of two components. The resulting four chapters constitute the core of the project. The theoretical chapters (Chapters One and Two) provide a framework for understanding the federal system both in the general context of the American Constitution and, more specifically, in contrast with the separation of powers. This framework is fundamentally structured by the underdeterminate constitutional division of state and national powers and the consequent need for constitutional construction of the state-federal relationship. The developmental chapters (Chapters Three and Four) operationalize the theoretical framework developed in the first two chapters in two different domains: constitutional jurisprudence and a discrete episode of the political construction of the state-federal relationship. Taken together, these chapters are intended to illustrate the central argument of the preceding chapters: that the constitutional design of the federal system anticipates development and that this development is inflected by the institutional logics of the principal institutions of American government. The dissertation concludes with a brief reflection on the two conceptual cornerstones of the analysis presented in the preceding chapters: constitutional construction and constitutional logics.
Weak review, strong court : judicial institutions and influence in the US and France
(2023-05-05) Blass, Abby (Ph. D in government); Brinks, Daniel M., 1961-; Jacobsohn, Gary; Elkins, Zachary; Theriault, Sean; Perez-Liñan, Aníbal
This dissertation explores differences in the willingness of high court judges to use their authority of constitutional review to participate in national policymaking. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of judicial decisions invalidating national laws over thirty years in the United States and France, I show how, contrary to conventional wisdom, judges with weaker forms of review in political systems that offer straightforward ways to displace judicial opinions show greater willingness to review and to invalidate national laws, over a broader range of policy domains, than their counterparts with strong form review in fragmented political environments that offer judges the “last word”. Drawing on institutional and strategic insights about judicial decision making, I show that judges perceive and experience the costs of exceeding the tolerance of political actors with the power to curtail their institutional autonomy and authority, and over time they learn to balance the immediate cost of losing a discrete policy battle versus the systemic cost of losing their institutional capacity to contribute to contemporary policy debates. My results show that, counterintuitively, giving judges the ‘last word’ on matters of policy may be counterproductive to the project of judicial empowerment, and the contrast in judicial styles with weak and strong review suggests that scholars must be more nuanced in evaluating judicial power, looking beyond the more confrontational and disruptive interventions of the Supreme Court as the standard model of judicial influence, to the more cooperative and consensual engagement of the French Constitutional Council.