In October 1999, some fifteen academic experts and government practitio ners from Germany and North America gathered for two days at the Uni ver sity of Augsburg to discuss the topic of "Constitutional Reform and Consti tutional Jurisprudence in Canada and the United States." The present volume documents the results of that conference, a collaborative effort of the De partment of Political Science, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the Institute for Canadian Studies, University of Augsburg. In organizing this workshop, we were guided by two basic sets of ideas and assumptions: First, all "established" democracies are regularly confron ted with the need to adjust their constitutional order to changes in their envi ronment lest democratic stability be transformed into rigidity; in many wes tern nations, including Canada and the United States, developments such as the crisis of the Keynesian welfare-state or the emergence of increasingly heterogeneous, postmodern societies have ushered in an era of heightened, yet not always successful constitutional reform activity. Secondly, however, there is no unique path towards, or model of, an "optimal" constitutional order, however defined; rather, constitutional reform processes, their under Iying normative principles and their outcomes are strongly path and context dependent. Therefore, the participants of the workshop and authors of this volume were asked to examine the specific preconditions, context, nature and impact of recent constitutional reform processes in the Uni ted States and Canada.

For years the public has become increasingly disillusioned and cynical about its governmental institutions. In the face of alarming problems-most notably the $400 billion budget deficit-the government seems deadlocked, reduced to partisan posturing and bickering, with the president and Congress blaming each other for failure. And neither party can be held accountable. The public tendency is to blame individual leaders- or politicians as a class-but an insistent and growing number of experienced statesmen and political scientists believe that much of the difficulty can be traced to the governmental structure itself, designed in the eighteenth century and essentially unchanged since then. Is that inherited constitutional system adequate to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, or has the time come for fundamental change? Should we adopt an electoral system that encourages unified control of the presidency, the Senate and the House? Lengthen terms of office? Limit congressional terms? Abolish or modify the electoral college? Introduce a mechanism for calling special elections? Permit legislators to hold executive offices? Redistribute the balance of powers within the governmental system? In this revised edition of his highly acclaimed 1986 volume, James Sundquist reviews the origins and rationale of the constitutional structure and the current debate about whether reform is needed, then raises practical questions about what changes might work best if a consensus should emerge that the national government is too prone to stalemate to meet its responsibilities. Analyzing the main proposals advanced to adapt the Constitution to current conditions, he attempts to separate the workable ideas from the unworkable, the effective from the ineffective, the possibly feasible from the wholly infeasible, and finally arrives at a set of recommendations of his own.

Political historians recognize the colonial years and the American Revolution, the early national era and the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the nineteenth century and the American Civil War as the three most important eras in American history. Recreating the American Republic offers the first comparative historical analysis and synthesis of these.

Responding to the increasing diversity of the Canadian population -- and to an increasing sensitivity to historical diversities -- the 1982 Constitution Act amended the British North America Act and introduced the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, giving new powers to heterogeneous groups within the Canadian polity. These changes disturbed the equilibrium of an older, federalist Canada whose constitutional concerns were limited to the relative powers of federal and provincial governments and to French-English ethnic/linguistic questions. Cairns underlines the significance of international influences on the development of Canada's constitution, in particular the adoption of the Charter, and examines the constitution's role in shaping Canadians' civic identities and community conceptions. He argues that the constitution is a powerful mobilizing instrument that shapes the people subject to its authority. Canada is now populated by what Cairns calls "Charter Canadians," who see themselves as rights-bearers and tend to look to the federal government as the effective focus of political community. During the Meech Lake affair, the demands of Charter Canadians and politicized aboriginal peoples clashed with Quebec's constitutional aspirations as well as older élite accommodation politics. In addition to the Charter, the 1982 Constitution Act contained a new amending formula that contradicted the Charter's message that the rights of individuals precede those of governments. This formula gave a collective of federal and provincial governments a formal monopoly on constitutional change and encouraged the belief, refuted by the Meech Lake experience, that they could amend the constitution in terms of their own self-interest and announce the results as a fait accompli. The clash between the Charter and the amending formula is constitutionally destabilizing, Cairns argues, because these two parts of the same constitution are based on different understandings of the fundamental purpose of the constitution and for whose benefit it exists. The Meech Lake fiasco, having brought Canada to the brink of disaster, clearly indicates that Canada's future constitutional health depends not only on the reconciliation of Quebec with the rest of Canada but -- respectful of the Charter's message -- on a simultaneous constitutional rapprochement between citizens and governments in the process of constitutional reform.

How state constitutional reform guides and stabilizes American constitutional and political development State constitution reform guides and stabilizes American constitutional and political development. Using data sets and historical case studies, Robinson Woodward-Burns shows how the federal government has repeatedly deferred to state constitutional reform to manage or address difficult national constitutional controversies, including conflicts over the regulation of slavery, banking and taxation, women's suffrage, labor and welfare rights, voting and civil rights, and gender discrimination.

The political book of the year, from the acclaimed founder and director of the Center for politics at the University of Virginia.

The contributions here consider a number of themes and issues which account for the successful democratization of the United States and Canada and offer an analysis of the reasons for the absence of democratization in Mexico.

Classic Books Library presents this brand new edition of “The Federalist Papers”, a collection of separate essays and articles compiled in 1788 by Alexander Hamilton. Following the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, the governing doctrines and policies of the States lacked cohesion. “The Federalist”, as it was previously known, was constructed by American statesman Alexander Hamilton, and was intended to catalyse the ratification of the United States Constitution. Hamilton recruited fellow statesmen James Madison Jr., and John Jay to write papers for the compendium, and the three are known as some of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755–1804) was an American lawyer, journalist and highly influential government official. He also served as a Senior Officer in the Army between 1799-1800 and founded the Federalist Party, the system that governed the nation’s finances. His contributions to the Constitution and leadership made a significant and lasting impact on the early development of the nation of the United States.