Madison’s Paradox? Balancing ‘Rigidity’ and ‘Flexibility’ in Comparative Federal Design and Practice

• In Event: Design and Emergence of Formal and Informal Institutions

Brief Overview

The paper theorizes that robust federal constitutional design must balance rigidity and flexibility. It draws on new original data of some 1000 amendments in 8 federations to test the causal relevance of a novel institutional embeddedness-hypothesis.

Authors

• Rahel Freiburghaus, University of Bern

• Adrian Vatter, University of Bern (Switzerland)