Published on Show Me Mizzou Dec. 17, 2025
For nearly 250 years, the United States has been a constitutional democracy whose constitution doesn’t mention the word “democracy.” Despite spurts of political tumult, thus far that constitution has proved as stable as any other in the world. Those seeming contradictions are at the core of Studies in Constitutional Democracy, an interdisciplinary book series launched by the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy and the University of Missouri Press in 2016. Since then, the institute has printed at least two books per year on topics ranging from voting rights to the origins of modern law to slavery to religious dissent. Titles in the series include The Panic of 1819: The First Great Depression; Reforming Legislatures: American Voters and State Ballot Measures, 1792–2020; and Pushback: The Political Fallout of Unpopular Supreme Court Decisions.
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