Constituent Power Ratings of U.S. State ConCons Since 1776

 vithe allInstructions to sort and filter:

• To sort, click on a table heading.
• To filter, enter a value in the form below.

The numbers “1” and “0” in the question fields:

• “1” stands for “yes.”
• “0” stands for “no.”

Sources and Methods:
This table is derived from Appendix A in Robinson Woodward-Burns’ Hidden Laws, Yale University Press, 2021, a book that argues that state constitutions stabilize American politics by taking on difficult issues the Federal government fails to address. This version of his table only includes state conventions. His table also includes records of state commissions to propose constitutional change, state preparatory commissions to support conventions, and state legislatures convened as conventions (e.g., in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776). This table reorganizes his fields, assigns new headings, adds a constituent power ranking field, converts his Yes/No values to 1/0 to facilitate ranking, and changes “constitution” to “revision” for the purposes of the proposed change field. It is also sortable with a single click; if you want to see the data sorted chronologically rather than by state, this is straightforward.

A higher ranking (ranging from 0 to 2) indicates a more democratic convention.  A convention receives one point for having an agenda uncontrolled by the state legislature and one point if it was limited to proposal power (that is, if its proposals required a popular ratification vote to pass into law).

Using Woodward-Burns’ generous definition of a “convention,” he finds 256 state conventions in America’s history. This number is arguably too high. For example, should all the Rhode Island conventions during the Dorr Rebellion Era in the early 1840s be defined as conventions?  The U.S. Supreme Court in Luther v. Borden (1949) chose not to recognize Thomas Dorr’s convention as a legal convention. Should all the Southern secessionist “conventions” from the early 1860s be defined as conventions? How about the dueling conventions in the mid-19th Century when some states were formed? How about a statehood convention in the early 20th Century for a joint state (Arizona–New Mexico) that proposed a constitution that wasn’t approved by either Congress or voters? How about ratification as opposed to proposing conventions, as in Vermont during the 19th Century?

Other scholars, notably Albert Sturm, operationally defined a “convention” more narrowly, and most subsequent convention counts, such as the one on this website (“State Constitutional Conventions Since 1776”), have been based on his data. But Sturm counts as “conventions” those that lacked unlimited agenda-setting power, popular ratification votes, and other features that are arguably essential to a well-designed convention process.  If we start with Woodwards-Burns’s data but accept as “conventions” only those with a ratification vote, we obtain only 177 conventions.  If we accept as “conventions” only those with both an unlimited agenda and a ratification vote, we obtain only 157 conventions.

Woodward-Burns’ source codes are:

B: Council of State Governments
G: Greenwood/Oxford Commentaries on the State Constitutions of the United States
O: Other
S: Sturm
T: Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions (1909)