The control of politicians within a constitutional framework: the case of state-level recall provisions

Abstract

As previously recognized, the structure of representative democracy is endogenous and the choice of constitutional provisions selected by such organizations is important. The present paper focuses on constitutional choices that work to control the behaviour of elected officials by examining the constitutional ease of recalling elected officials across the 50 states. After developing a numerical measure of the ‘ease’ with which registered voters can recall officials, ordinary logistic, ordered logistic and tobit models are employed to examine the factors of such an endogenous choice across states. The results are quite consistent with the theoretical models developed previously by public choice and constitutional scholars.