Abstract: When investigating human evolution and their self-organization, one may ask about the seemingly emergent properties of human civilization that have developed around cooperative mechanisms, such as socialization, resource management and community building. The concept of institutions may very well have emerged from an evolution of these cooperative mechanisms, in part, to normalize civil and political order. The institutional dynamics framework we adopted from Poon and colleagues (2022), provides a principled structure for evaluating institutions. In the author's view an institution can be represented as a public ledger. This public ledger is a history of institutional rules and practices, which is realized in public opinion. To investigate institutional dynamics and institutional change we set out to evaluate the relative-evolution of both political regimes and national constitutions. The central question is concerend with whether national constitutions have had an impact on the emerging political regimes of the 21st century. And if so, can we discern episodes of continuity from those of discontinuity between a political regime and its national constitution. We combined qualitative and quantitative analyses to demonstrate global constitutional adoption, with an emphasis on the historical implications of these political technologies and their relative-effect on contemporary governing processes and state development.
Speaker
Montrell Vass