Helping a friend form a dissertation proposal

This weekend we had a friend visit from Mexico City. He is the dean of a law school there. But he is also working on a doctorate and like many students at this point in a doctoral program - he is stuck. He is concerned about "legitimacy" in government. But as I listened to him talk about his ideas, I thought they were not very well formed. He has had a very busy and unsettling year - so that is not entirely unexpected. His dissertation is being written in a faculty of economics. Thus, as we discussed his ideas, we looked at the recent Mexican election but from the focus of a field called Public Choice.

He did his undergraduate degree in Law and so we talked about a 16th Century writer named Hugo Grotius. (His image is in this post). Grotius is generally conceded as the writer of one of the first books on international law. When I read his De jure belli ac pacis as an undergraduate (which is The Law of War and Peace) he explained something called Pacta sunt servanda (promises must be kept - in essence the standards of the pact should not be violated). Its opposing term is rebis sic stantibus (things thus standing) means that the conditions which brought the original agreement have changed. He wondered whether that concept could be applied to the US election of 2000 and the Mexican election of 2006. In both cases the losing candidate tried dilligently to change the rules of the game, after the election had been held.

Public Choice Economics has done a lot of work on constitutional systems and also on the theory of rent seeking. There is a rich body of literature in Public Choice which should help him build a model. It is interesting that in both countries there is an earlier example of a candidate losing a very close election where the candidate did not contest the results. In 1960 Nixon lost an election under what some observers called questionable circumstances from results in Ilinois. But he chose not to contest the results from Ilinois. The fact that the Mayor of Chicago was one of the first guests in the White House after Kennedy was inaugurated, is probably just a coincidence.

In the 1988 Mexican election, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was in the lead as results were being presented live to the Mexican people. The IBM computer system that was producing the results all of a sudden failed(under questionable circumstances) and when the computer was restored Carlos Salinas was declared the winner. Cárdenas chose not to contest the election and Salinas served for six years - in what was the beginning of the changes in Mexico's political system. The 1994 and 2000 elections did not have the same kind of hijinks that put Salinas in office.

But in both the 2000 US election and the 2006 Mexican election the loser of the campaign chose question the legitimacy of the election. The supporters of Vice President Gore choose to question the integrity of the Florida electoral process, with some probable cause. But as the story developed Gore's supporters increased the range and depth of their claims against the process of the election - ultimately their cause became to count every vote. In Mexico the laws setting up the IFE also established a series of procedural guarantees that attempted to assure the integrity of the process. But as it became clear that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador lost the election, they also began to claim that every vote should be counted - vota por vota. Ultimately both made the claim that somehow the system was denying their voters the right to be counted. In one sense the chaotic environment in Florida added to the confusion but there is little question that the process in Mexico was almost the mark of orderliness.

My friend's dissertation will use the analytical techniques of Public Choice theory to attempt to explain why losing candidates are more ready to not only contest the election but to question the very legitimacy of the system. I will look forward to see what his research will come up with. If he does a great job, it could be a very interesting paper.

If you have comments about the proposal, post a comment and I will pass it on to him.