The American Founding: Motivations of the Framers at the Constitutional Convention

上个世纪，学者们一直在争论制宪会议制定者的动机。一些人认为代表们是根据他们个人的经济利益投票的，而另一些人则认为代表们是根据国家利益或政治意识形态投票的。该项目在三个重要方面扩展了目前对制宪会议的理解。首先，它通过从以前无法获得的州唱名投票记录和手稿中推断代表的投票模式，增加了可用观察结果的数量。其次，它允许更精确地测试关于委托动机的各种假设，包括比尔德的论文、关于意识形态的理论和理性自利的理论。第三，分析可能影响代表投票行为的组成利益类型：州议员的利益（选举代表参加大会的人），州内公民的利益（代表据称代表的人），以及代表所在县居民的利益（他们可能选举未来职位的代表）。研究结果对政治学、经济学和法律研究具有重要意义。

For the last century, scholars have debated the motivation of the framers at the constitutional convention. Some have argued that the delegates voted according to their personal economic interests, while others have argued that the delegates voted according to national interests or political ideologies. The project extends current understandings of the constitutional convention in three important ways. First, it increases the number of usable observations by inferring delegate voting patterns from the records of state roll call votes and manuscripts that were previously unavailable. Second, it allows for more precise testing of various hypotheses concerning delegate motivation, including Beard's thesis, theories about ideology, and theories of rational self-interest. Third, it analyzes the type of constituent interests that may have affected delegates' voting behavior: the interests of state legislators (who elected delegates to the convention), the interests of citizens within a state (who the delegates allegedly represented), and the interests of people living in the delegate's county (who might elect delegates to future posts). The results have important implications for political science, economics, and the study of the law.