Formal Models of Legal Authority in Early America (1660-1810)

Beyond its normative relevance, the question of how institutions obtain, maintain, utilize, and lose authority is an important historical and conceptual issue. Early American politics in the colonial and revolutionary eras provides fruitful ground for exploring how the authority of institutions affects politics, and how political developments affect institutional authority. Applying game theory to questions of historical political development allows us to clearly identify strategic incentives and generalize from particular cases. In three papers, this dissertation combines historical case studies and formal models to investigate different aspects of legal authority in American political development./nIn the first paper, I investigate how purely formal constraints on political actors are enforced through coordination among citizens, and conditions under which such coordination fails. Specifically, this paper argues that economic power is a crucial variable for understanding the rule of law. I make this argument in two ways. First, I present a formal model to show how economic inequality undermines the rule of law. In the model, coordination among citizens increases the expense that elites face to implement an unconstitutional policy. But this constraint only binds when elites’ material resources are sufficiently low relative to those of citizens. Second, I relate the model to a historical case. In the early American republic, elites repeatedly expressed concerns about the expense of suppressing armed challenges to the constitutional order, supporting compromise instead. Amid contemporary concerns about the rule of law, this argument indicates the value of renewed attention to economic power./nIn the second paper, I analyze contrasting political effects of different structures of legal authority. In the process of both European and American state development, legal institutions developed from many separate venues with overlapping jurisdictions to a hierarchical structure with authority concentrated in the lawmaking institutions of the state. How did this change in the structure of legal authority affect political competition among groups in society? This paper presents a formal model to show that concentrating legal authority increases incentives for competing groups to invest in political organization. In turn, this increases political inequality: as all groups invest more effort, groups with a resource advantage are better able to make use of their advantage. The model is consistent with a case comparison of 18th century Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, two British American colonies with contrasting legal structures, patterns of political organization, and legal outcomes./nThe third paper provides a strategic mechanism by which the boundaries of authority between institutions incrementally change over time. Fundamental political change often occurs gradually, and it is therefore important to understand the strategic underpinnings of gradual institutional change. This paper presents a game in which players are entirely strategic and share proposal power, while showing how one player can gradually accumulate authority over time at the expense of another. The model analyzes a bargaining problem between two actors. Over an infinite number of periods, each actor has a chance each period to propose a bundle of future authority plus present policy, which creates the potential for actors to trade authority for temporary policy concessions. With some degree of noise in the division of authority, a proposal that transfers authority reduces the reservation value of the respondent, creating an incentive for the proposer to trade present policy for future authority. The model shows how ongoing, everyday political interactions gradually rearrange authority relationships among political institutions.

Advisor: Gailmard, Sean
Schickler, Eric