Self-rule and Self-control by Matthew Botvinick :: SSRN
Constitutional commitments impinge upon democratic freedoms. What justifies our acceptance of such bonds? One answer might be that constitutional commitments help us overcome a self-control problem, buttressing against temptations that democracy otherwise creates. This idea had a brief vogue in the scholarly literature, but a number of persistent doubts have since cast it into disfavor. I attempt here to rehabilitate the self-control view of constitutional precommitment. To do so, I appeal to current models of temptation and self-control from psychology and behavioural economics. Application of these models to constitutional precommitment suggests an updated theory, which imports basic insights from political theory. The resulting model offers a novel justification for constitutional precommitment, as well as a set of hypotheses for political psychology.