Legal Institutions and the Democratic Order. [PDF]

Do legal institutions that limit governmental power promote order in democracies? In spite of the worldwide rule of law project, which is predicated on knowing the answer to this question, there is simply no systematic empirical test of the relationship between legal institutions that constrain arbitrary state power and democratic order. Indeed, the mainstream literature on democratic survival simply ignores the influence of effective legal institutions, focusing instead on sociocultural, institutional and macro-economic explanations. Following North, Summerhill and Weingast (2000) we suggest that ensuring the democratic order requires the resolution of a commitment problem over rights, property rights and others. Conceptualized in this way, legal institutions can preserve order when macro-economic or sociocultural factors might lead to disorder. We find that effective legal institutions are positively associated with democratic survival and negatively associated with violent political events, two central measures of democratic order.