Constitutions and Commitment¶
North, D. C., & Weingast, B. R. (1989). Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England. Journal of Economic History, 49(4), 803-832.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Property Rights
- Political science: The state's role in defining, recording, and enforcing who controls what is central to state capacity; secure property rights are widely argued to be a precondition for credible commitment, long-horizon investment, and the constraint of arbitrary expropriation by rulers, with North and Weingast's analysis of seventeenth-century England a canonical case.
This sourceCanonical case that credible commitment to secure property rights, by constraining arbitrary expropriation, underpins long-horizon investment; supports the political-science claim.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The article's abstract states that England's post-1688 institutions let the government commit credibly to upholding property rights — the canonical case cited — but says nothing of state capacity or long-horizon investment.
“We argue that the new institutions allowed the government to commit credibly to upholding property rights.”
- Political science: The state's role in defining, recording, and enforcing who controls what is central to state capacity; secure property rights are widely argued to be a precondition for credible commitment, long-horizon investment, and the constraint of arbitrary expropriation by rulers, with North and Weingast's analysis of seventeenth-century England a canonical case.
- Severed Accountability Via Unearned Revenue
- The nominal accountability constituency is the citizenry, who in the ordinary fiscal contract hold exit-and-voice leverage through taxation: a government that must raise revenue from its citizens depends on their productivity and consent, and that dependence transmits the citizens' demands (for services, rule of law, representation) back into the government's incentives — "no taxation without representation" names the coupling.
This sourceEstablishes the tax-for-representation fiscal contract linking a state's dependence on citizen revenue to accountable, constrained governance.
- The nominal accountability constituency is the citizenry, who in the ordinary fiscal contract hold exit-and-voice leverage through taxation: a government that must raise revenue from its citizens depends on their productivity and consent, and that dependence transmits the citizens' demands (for services, rule of law, representation) back into the government's incentives — "no taxation without representation" names the coupling.
Verification¶
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Registry ID ref:667015b4a25e · see in the full table