Chapter 4 analyses Hegel’s reasons for choosing the bicameral system at a time when it was anything but widespread and in fact hotly contested. It reconstructs the arguments advanced then, both in favour of a two-chamber system and in opposition to it, and argues that Hegel’s acceptance of bicameralism must be understood as taking a deliberate stance in the constitutional debate of post-Napoleonic Germany. Essentially, he advances two arguments for the institution of two chambers. First, the division of the Estates Assembly into two chambers will lead to improved decision-making and second, there will be less direct opposition between the Estates and the government. The contextualisation of these two arguments reveals that Hegel distils only the main arguments of one side in a heated controversy while excluding counter-arguments and ideas of alternative mechanisms in circulation at the time. In the process, this chapter especially explores arguments about the role and composition of the first chamber, which corresponds to what is nowadays conventionally called the second chamber and often dubbed a ‘house of review’. Important questions about the social implications of the bicameral system are also raised in this context.

This chapter analyzes a number of single constitutional traits such as the form of government, the structure of the state (unitary or federal), whether direct democracy institutions can be used, and so on. With regard to each of these (and many other) traits, their effects (economic and otherwise) are discussed first, followed by a discussion of possible determinants. Hence, it is for instance discussed why some countries have a federal structure whereas others have a unitary one.

In some polities the exercise of political power is highly concentrated, and in others it is widely dispersed. In Chapter 11, we examine the effects of scale on power concentration, arguing that the degree of horizontal and vertical concentration of power in a polity is affected by the number of people residing within that polity. The larger the polity, the more fragmented its institutional design is likely to be. This is a function of (1) increased heterogeneity, which entails that larger communities are difficult to govern in a concentrated fashion, and (2) lower levels of trust, which call for institutional constraints on the center that cannot be easily overcome. To tackle this vast subject we adopt a variety of country-level indicators of power concentration including subnational regions, federalism, bicameralism, revenue decentralization, capital city size, and checks and balances. We also probe a variety of subnational indicators focused on variation across states and localities within the United States. Most of these analyses support the contention that scale is associated with deconcentrated power.

Although Emmanuel Sieyès is often read as a theorist of sovereignty, I argue that he theorised constituent power as a way of framing the principle of popular power alternative to ideas of both national and popular sovereignty. In his view, both versions of sovereignty attributed unlimited and absolute power to either the representatives in parliament (national sovereignty) or the multitude (popular sovereignty) and resulted, respectively, in legislative blockages or re-totale. Sieyès introduced his theory of constituent power to avoid both outcomes. Constituent power allowed him to claim that political authority resided in the people but was limited to the authorisation of the constitution-writing process, as carried out by elected representatives. Once the constitution entered into force, the people’s constituent power would retreat and make space for the constituted order, run by representative institutions. Yet these only had a limited power, as they could only act within the limits imposed by the people when authorising the constitution. The outcome of this theoretical construction is a constitutional representative government where the people who hold the original constituent power exercise it only indirectly (contra popular sovereignty), while the delegates who hold a derived constituted power exercise it only within limits (contra national sovereignty).