The control of politicians within a constitutional framework: the case of state-level recall provisions

As previously recognized, the structure of representative democracy is endo genous and the choice of constitutional provisions selected by such organiz ations is important. The present paper focuses on constitutional choices th at work to control the behaviour of elected officials by examining the cons titutional ease of recalling elected officials across the 50 states. After developing a numerical measure of the 'ease' with which registered voters c an recall officials, ordinary logistic, ordered logistic and tobit models a re employed to examine the factors of such an endogenous choice across stat es. The results are quite consistent with the theoretical models developed previously by public choice and constitutional scholars.