Constituting Power

Constitutive rules have been an important concept in philosophy of the last century. However, this concept tends to divide scholars between those who consider it to be an important explanatory tool and those who, instead, believe it to be void. In previous writings, I have tried to defend the heuristic relevance of this concept and to qualify it against several objections. In this paper, I discuss the relation between constitutive and power-conferring rules and, more in general, the relation between constitutive rules and institutional power. I argue that the set of constitutive rules and power-conferring rules overlap but do not coincide: Some, but not all constitutive rules have a power-conferring nature and, conversely, some, but not all power-conferring rules have a constitutive role. Then, I consider a broader question, namely, the relation between constitutive rules and institutional power, and I show that not all institutional power is coincident with power constituted or conferred by rules.