Stability of Constitutions

Constitution is a pair of rules (s, S) that are used in a voting situation. The rule s is used to vote about the existing alternatives and the rule S is used to vote about changing the rule s to some other rule s′ . We consider what kind of constitutions are likely to emerge as prominent ones if the constitutions contain more than just two rules. In a constitution that contains any number of rules the nth rule is used to decide about the n - 1 th rule. We define a notion of stability for the constitutions and show that all stable constitutions roughly contain the same rule from n = 2 onwards. This is one explanation to the casual observation that the constitutions have usually only two rules. Copyright © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc..