12 - Constitutions

Summary

The question is: Does constitutional structure cause a political condition and a state of public opinion or does the political condition and a state of public opinion cause the constitutional structure? This sounds at first like the chicken and egg problem in which there is no causal direction; but I think that usually there is a cause and that constitutional forms are typically derivative. It seems probable to me that public opinion usually causes constitutional structure, and seldom, if ever, the other way around.

William H. Riker

In a fast-paced world of alert publics, troubled economies, and deep cleavages, what roles, if any, can constitutional arrangements play in controlling, modifying, or adapting how communities and societies adapt to a widening Frontier? If it is the case that centralizing tendencies are fostering the formation of transnational authorities, that decentralizing tendencies are relocating legitimacy in the direction of subnational authorities, and that as a result the scope of national governance is undergoing erosion, to what extent can the dynamics of change be absorbed and directed by the legal arrangements through which peoples accommodate to each other? Indeed, with the identities of people and the boundaries of their systems undergoing transformation, are formal constitutions tending toward obsolescence and thus increasingly in need of extensive revision?