23 - Political Aspects

Summary

Constitutions - in a political sense - provide solutions to the age old problem of leadership changes and how majorities and minorities should interact. If political communities solve these problems the can better coordinate their efforts, which in turn will give them a competitive advantage (military, fiscal, economic, etc.) to other (less coordinated) political communities. This chapter looks into the political effects constitutions have, and how they try to calibrate these kind of balances. It also look into the possibilities of calculating or engineering (new) balances like this, for instance for divided societies and transitional democracies (constitutional engineering)