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*. Erik Jones is Professor of European Studies and International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS). Contact email:
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Matthias Matthijs is Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS). Contact email:
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A good and sound constitution is one under which the law holds sway over the hearts of the citizens; for, short of the moment when the power of legislation shall have accomplished precisely that, the laws will continue to be evaded. (Rousseau 1985 [1772]: 4)
Over the past decade, growing institutional dysfunction and rising popular discontent have characterized the politics of the Western democratic world. Almost everywhere you look, democratically elected governments are struggling for legitimacy. They are either mired in institutional gridlock, hamstrung by international commitments, threatened by populist anti-establishment or anti-system insurgencies, unable to cope effectively with some of the adverse consequences of globalization, or bereft of healthy growth rates due to secular stagnation or crippling public and private debt overhangs.1In a few cases, governments have even been elected on outright anti-democratic platforms and, once in office, have started to chip away at pluralist democratic principles and procedures that had been taken for granted since the early 1990s.2
In the end, you can have the best political institutions in the world, but if the people who live within them do not want to use them the way they were designed to function, then those institutions will not work. Populists across the political spectrum will be quick to exploit a crisis and question the legitimacy of the existing political system (Elchardus and Spruyt 2016; Houle and Kenny 2016; Moffitt 2015). The challenge politicians face is to make people want to use common institutions properly and to agree on what constitutes proper use in the first place. This is the difficulty that Jean-Jacques Rousseau faced in his 'considerations on the government of Poland and on its proposed reformation' (Rousseau 1985 [1772]).3
Politicians and policymakers continue to wrestle with this problem at all levels of government today. Moreover, better institutions or 'structural reforms' were not the answer for Rousseau and they are not the answer now: 'What is impossible is to make laws that the passions of men will not corrupt -...