About

Jim Zink is an Associate Professor at the School of Public and International Affairs within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at NC State University. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis, a J.D. from DePaul University College of Law, and a B.A. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame. His areas of expertise encompass political theory, American political thought, and constitutionalism. Zink has contributed to scholarly discussions on American constitutionalism, constitutional amendment processes, and the moral psychology of political institutions. His research includes examining the influence of historical debates, such as the Publicola debate and the French Revolution, on American constitutional thought, as well as exploring the concept of constitutional veneration and the role of self-respect in justice theories.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Law
• Psychoanalysis
• Theology
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• History
• Mathematics
• Geography
• Art history

Selected publications

• Amendment Culture in the United States: On the Nature and Effects of “Constitutional Veneration”

  Political Research Quarterly · 2025-06-25

  article1st author

  Political commentators have noted a peculiar aspect of present-day political dysfunction in the United States: Americans continue to “revere” the U.S. Constitution, even though the founding document itself is arguably responsible for many of the current political problems Americans so bemoan. On this telling, Americans’ tendency to view the Constitution as sacrosanct has significantly contributed to the precarious political moment by effectively foreclosing much needed constitutional reforms. Using a randomized experiment administered on the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), the present study examines these claims by (a) identifying those most likely to “venerate” the U.S. Constitution and (b) testing the extent to which a sense of constitutional veneration disposes individuals against constitutional change. Our findings suggest that while not everyone can be said to venerate the Constitution, those who do exhibit a higher baseline level of resistance to constitutional amendment. Moreover, our treatment illustrates that a sense of constitutional reverence can be activated and made accessible to individuals as they consider constitutional issues and, in turn, bias them against proposed constitutional reforms. These findings suggest that constitutional veneration, to the extent it is widespread, may contribute to constitutional stasis and the problems associated with it.

  PublisherDOI

• Emily Pears: Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. xi, 300.)

  The Review of Politics · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Philosophy

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Is “Constitutional Veneration” an Obstacle to Constitutional Amendment?

  Journal of Experimental Political Science · 2021 · 12 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  Abstract Some constitutional scholars suggest that the US Constitution stands as one of the oldest yet least changed national constitutions in part because Americans’ tendency to “revere” the Constitution has left them unwilling to consider significant changes to the document. Several recent studies support aspects of this claim, but no study establishes a direct link between individuals’ respect for the Constitution and their reluctance to amend it. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design of Zink and Dawes (2016) across two survey experiments. The key difference in our experiments is we include measures of respondents’ propensity to revere the Constitution, which in turn allows us to more directly test whether constitutional veneration translates into resistance to amendment. Our results build on Zink and Dawes’s findings and show that, in addition to institutional factors, citizens’ veneration of the Constitution can act as a psychological obstacle to constitutional amendment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Constitutional idolatry and democracy: Challenging the infatuation with writtenness. Brian ChristopherJonesEdward Elgar Publishing, Northampton, MA, 2020. 224 pp. $120 (cloth)

  Governance · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• The Missouri Controversy at 200

  The Political Science Reviewer · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Professor James Zink provides an overview of the symposium, The Missouri Compromise at 200.

  Publisher

• The Independence of the Declaration and Constitution

  The Political Science Reviewer · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The first Missouri crisis represents an important and particularly contentious early instance of Americans coming to grips with constitutional disharmony, and the corresponding attempts to resolve tensions within the U.S. Constitution’s text generated dramatically different understandings of the American political order. I chart these diverging conceptions of American union by analyzing the congressional debate over Missouri’s statehoodas reported in theAnnals of Congress, focusing in particular on the different ways participants in the debate construed the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the relationship between those two documents. This lens offers one the clearest indications of the transformative nature of the debate and reveals how slavery became the primary prism through which participants interpreted America’s founding ideals and institutions. The Missouri crisis represented a revisitation of the American founding in toto, except this time slavery occupied a central role as participants attempted to (re)interpret America’s founding principles and the idea of American constitutional union.

  Publisher

• James Wilson’s Science of Politics and the Moral Psychology of American Constitutionalism

  American Political Thought · 2018-09-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We use James Wilson’s institutional science of politics as a lens for viewing his broader understanding of American constitutionalism. Wilson accepted the “Madisonian” view that government institutions should be designed to check humans’ vicious tendencies, both among the people and within government. But he also thought they could be carefully crafted to simultaneously encourage humans’ other-regarding passions and innate moral propensities, thereby establishing popular politics on the most stable of foundations: a benevolent people. Wilson’s emphasis on the role of government institutions in promoting moral and prosocial behavior reflects his distinctive understanding of American constitutionalism and draws attention to an underappreciated aspect of the American constitutional tradition.

  PublisherDOI

• Conventional Wisdom: The Alternate Article V Mechanism for Proposing Amendments to the U.S. Constitution

  Political Science Quarterly · 2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Although all 27 amendments to the U.S. Constitution were first approved by Congress and then ratified by the states, Article V of the Constitution also allows for “a convention for proposing amendments.” The convention mechanism has never been used, but frustration with the difficulty of getting amendments through Congress has pushed constitutional reformers to seriously consider this mode of amendment. That there is no precedent for an Article V convention, however, raises questions about the constitutionality and practicality of using conventions to effect limited constitutional change. In Conventional Wisdom, John R. Vile sets out to address these questions, and the result is a valuable work of scholarship of interest to constitutional scholars and political practitioners alike. Vile confronts the two biggest objections to using Article V conventions to amend the Constitution. First, many argue that Article V does not permit Congress or the states to limit the amendments proposed in an Article V convention, which suggests that the convention mechanism is appropriate only for considering wholesale changes to the Constitution. But Vile adduces evidence showing that many Framers, most notably, Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist, No. 85, understood Article V as allowing for limited conventions. Vile also explains how it came to be “conventional wisdom” that the convention mechanism was intended for systemic constitutional revision rather than for proposing a single amendment or narrow set of amendments. With a sweeping review of early constitutional commentary and the history of constitutional amendments and conventions in the United States, Vile argues persuasively that this view is in part attributable to the fact that the amendments making up the Bill of Rights, which were approved by Congress and ratified by the states shortly after the Constitution’s ratification, set a precedent that quickly, if unintentionally, made congressional approval and state ratification the default amendment mechanism and, in turn, biased subsequent views on the purpose of Article V conventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Therapeutic Politics: Rawls's Respect for Rousseau

  The Review of Politics · 2016-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract For nearly half a century democratic citizens have been preoccupied with the search for self-respect. Though classical liberalism places this question outside its purview and many commentators see in such a concern evidence of a “thin-skinned” political culture, John Rawls has recently provided serious arguments for the political relevance of self-respect. These arguments, we claim, are deeply indebted to the social and political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose deep albeit underexamined influence on Rawls shows itself both in Rawls's conception of the social problem as well as in his solution to it. Rawls's belief that the provision of self-respect can solve the social problem is uniquely Rousseauan not only because of its emphasis on equality but also because it suggests political life can and must reconcile the conflicts between self and society at a fundamental level.

  PublisherDOI

• The Dead Hand of the Past? Toward an Understanding of “Constitutional Veneration”

  Political Behavior · 2015-10-30 · 25 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Neal Banks

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Β. A. DeGraff

  James Madison University

  4 shared

• Wenying Xu

  Zhejiang University

  4 shared

• J. N. Demas

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Fran Wittich

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Christopher T. Dawes

  2 shared

• John S. Werner

  University of Lusaka

  1 shared

• John M. Warner

  1 shared

Labs

• Jim Zink LabPI

Awards & honors

• 2022 Journal of Experimental Political Science Award for Bes…