Enumerating rights: more is not always better. 2023

Sheryl Ball, and Chetan Dave, and Stefan Dodds
Department of Economics, Sheryl Ball, Virginia Tech, 3016 Pamplin Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0316 USA.

Contemporary political and policy debate rhetoric increasingly employs the language of 'rights': how they are assigned and what entitlements individuals in a society are due. While the obvious constitution design issues surround how rights enumeration affects the relationship between a government and its citizens, we instead analyze how rights framing impacts how citizens interact with each other. We design and implement a novel experiment to test whether social cooperation depends on the enumeration and positive or negative framing of the right of subjects to take a particular action. We find that when rights are framed positively, there exists an 'entitlement effect' that reduces social cooperation levels and crowds-out the tendency of individuals to act pro-socially.

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