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Recent studies of legislative gridlock espouse the importance of institutional design in separation-of-powers games. However, few scholars have focused on the effects of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution on legislative gridlock. This article attempts to fill that gap by determining whether the Constitution improved the marginal effect of the gridlock interval on the ability to change policy. Results suggest that policy is more responsive to the range of pivotal players (in both the negative and the positive direction) under the Constitution than under the Articles of Confederation, providing empirical evidence that it may be the superior design.

"In colonial America, democracy was centered in provincial assemblies, and based on the collection of neighbors whose freehold ownership made them permanent stakeholders in the community. The removal of the property qualification for voting in the United States occurred over three-quarters of a century and was among the more important events in the history of democratization, helping to shift voting from a corporate privilege to a human right. There are standard histories that trace the path of property qualification removal, both broadly over time and within each individual state. In this book, Justin Moeller and Ronald F. King adopt the theories and methods of formal analysis to discover patterns and regularities across historic cases, to attempt a more systematic understanding of the subject. While no social event has a single cause, party consolidation and partisan competition provided a necessary mechanism to background factors and make them politically relevant. Moeller and King argue that political parties used or rejected franchise rule reform strategically as a means of advancing their electoral position. This factor significantly helps to explain both temporal differences across states and the pattern of contestation within each state individually"--

In Colonial America, democracy was centered in provincial assemblies and based on the collection of neighbors whose freehold ownership made them permanent stakeholders in the community. The removal of the property qualification for voting in the United States occurred over three-quarters of a century and was among the more important events in the history of democratization, functioning to shift voting from a corporate privilege toward a human right.Moving beyond the standard histories of property standard histories of property qualification removal, Justin Moeller and Ronald F. King adopt the theories and methods of social science to discover underlying patterns and regularities, attempting a more systematic understanding of subject. While no historical event has a single cause, party consolidation and party competition provided a necessary mechanism, making background factors politically relevant. No change in franchise rules could occur without the explicit consent of incumbent politicians, always sensitive to the anticipated impact. Moeller and King argue that political parties acted strategically, accepting or rejecting removal of the property qualification as a means of advancing their electoral position. The authors identify four different variants of the strategic calculation variable, significantly helping to explain both the temporal differences across states and the pattern of contestation with each state individually.