Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election in 1860 partly because of a split in the Democratic Party between Douglas and Breckenridge. This split destroyed the compromise over slavery that, in some sense, had been embedded or hidden within the Constitution. This paper identifies the beginning...

Two quite different, but equally plausible, theories of the “cause” of the foundation of the United States in 1787 have been put forward, first by Charles Beard (1913), and then by William Riker (1964). Beard’s thesis was that the preferences underlying the Ratification were generated by...

The key theoretical idea underlying this paper is that an institutional equilibrium can be destroyed or transformed by rapid belief changes in the population. The changes in electoral beliefs in the period prior to the election of Lincoln in 1860 and the commencement of the Civil War are...