Playing to Win: Strategic Constitutional Hardball and Democratic Erosion

• In Event: Formal Models of Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

Constitutional hardball—in which politicians interpret constitutions to their letter to gain partisan advantages—poses challenges to democratic stability. Many worry that the contemporary United States exhibits a pattern of asymmetric constitutional hardball in which the Republican party has uprooted existing institutional norms since the 1990s whereas the Democratic party has engaged in less normbreaking. We study strategic incentives behind this behavior by analyzing a game theoretic model in which each of two parties can shift institutional rules in their favor, constrained by constitutional limits. Institutional norms are stable if constitutional leeway is uncorrelated with partisan advantages or if both parties can credibly threaten each other with rule changes, but asymmetric hardball arises if only one party has high scope for partisan advantages. We then apply this logic to the United States: provisions in the federal constitution combined with the demographics of each party’s coalition yield long-term advantages for Republicans over Democrats on strategies such as voter suppression, gerrymandering, and concentrating power in federal and state legislatures.

Authors

• Gretchen Helmke, University of Rochester

• Jack Paine, University of Rochester