In the wake of Obama's reelection, many disgruntled Americans have taken to the government website We The People to sign online petitions for their states to secede from the union. Although any petition that garners more than 25,000 signiatures is required to recieve an official response from the White House, experts say the law is clear in that there is no legal recourse for secession.
This is an interesting application of Buchanan and Tullock's generalized theory of constitutions, in particular it demonstrates the necessity of different voting rules and imposed costs. Although, in reality, it is only a small minority of the population of most states that have signed the petition, let us assume for a moment that everyone in the state of Texas, under perfect information, knows that they will be "better off" if Texas is allowed to secede from the union. Even if all Texans unanimously desired to secede they would not be allowed to, however, because there is no constitutional basis for doing so. Implicitly, what would be required for a state to secede would be a large enough majority (2/3) in the House and Senate to ammend the constituion to allow for this and establish a voting rule within the state that wants to secede to declare its intention to secede. Thus, even if a group is harmed by the government (higher percieved external costs than benefits) they are bound by a strong decision making rule to stay within the country, because their secession would impose an external cost on others. From an economic perspective, if any group that felt it was disadvantaged by being part of the American nation were allowed to secede (i.e. high income people), we would be faced with a classic adverse selection problem.
The difficulty of ammending the constitution is justified when we think of ammendments having such high external costs as a state's secession. The constitution lays down the "rules of the game," rules which have high external costs to changing and thus require a large majority.
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