Abstract
American civil religion places the U.S. Constitution on a pedestal. Although this veneration is well-documented, it is unclear where it originates and why other constitutions do not attract the same reverence. We develop a measure of constitutional respect and conduct a randomized survey experiment testing whether new information can change respondents’ evaluations of their state or national constitutions. We find that people do respond to new information about state constitutions, but not to information about the national document, suggesting that Americans view the U.S. Constitution with the sort of veneration and reverence James Madison advocated, while viewing their state constitutions through a more Jeffersonian lens of legitimacy, one that favors continually revising these constitutions to meet the living generation’s needs.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
