A country can embrace a completely free market while simultaneously destroying its citizens' constitutional rights.
Economic liberalization does not naturally lead to or require a liberal constitutional regime. We have been taught for decades that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin. This research decouples them, showing that a government can advance market reforms while rolling back legal protections and individual liberties. Many free markets operate perfectly well, or even better, under authoritarian rules. This means that spreading capitalism to new countries will not necessarily lead to more freedom for the people living there.
Constitutional Costs to Free Market Transitions
SSRN · 6726718
We say that what is distinct about the constitutional transitions in the former Soviet bloc is that the states in the region are also undergoing massive economic and political transformations. Yet whereas there has been some scholarly analysis of the relation between economic and political transformations, 1 we constitutionalists appear to have been muddling along in our assumptions about the relation between the economic and constitutional transformations. That is, we have simply assumed a rela