A theory of constitutional standards and civil liberty (Q2729263)

The paper examines the tradeoff between coercion and self protection in a democracy. This tradeoff can be used to explain why potentially intolerant majorities in a democracy protect the rights of unpopular groups. Due to noise induced by imprecise auditing majority, groups will not necessarily impose legal standards which stringently punish the minority groups for deviant behavior. The reason is that they may end up severely punishing their own group by mistake. These effects are first investigated in a static model to get some insight. Then the model is extended to a dynamic version where the majority can impose increasingly intolerant standards on the minority by reducing the noise in the auditing. In this setting Markovian equilibria are investigated and the relation between the static and the dynamic model is discussed. It is shown that societies with high political turnover due to population changes are apt to choose tolerant legal standards. Societies with low turnover are more apt to choose more intolerant and unstable ones.