Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop on Wednesday, October 10 from 4:15-6:15 pm at the Political Science Thesis Room (5th floor). Hélène Landemore (Yale) will be presenting her paper, “When Public Participation Matters: The 2010-2013 Icelandic Constitutional Process.” The paper is attached and the abstract is below. Come to support your peer, engage in a lively discussion, share free wine and snacks, and network with your department.

Best,

CPW organizing committee

To download the paper, click here

Abstract: 

Public participation in constitution-making is now both an established international norm and a widespread practice. Among recent examples of participatory constitutional processes, one may count not only the subject of this article, the 2010-2013 Icelandic process, which arguably yielded the first “crowdsourced” constitutional proposal in the world; but also the 2012 Egyptian constitutional process, which asked the Egyptian public to comment on constitutional clauses online; the 2012 Irish constitutional process, which mixed randomly selected citizens and elected politicians in the assembly in charge of proposing amendments to the constitution; the 2011-2014 Tunisian constitutional process, which engaged in some amount of public outreach, as well as the Chilean reform process started in 2015, which, in the same spirit as these other processes, promised to open up dialogue on the constitutional process to citizens.

What does public participation mean for these new processes? Recent participatory constitutional processes assume a positive causal relation between public participation and the quality of constitutional processes’ outcomes. Is this assumption justified? This article contributes the on-going debate about the relationship between public participation and constitutional outcomes by offering one more case-study, the Icelandic case, in which public participation went beyond the classic upstream and downstream consultations recommended by normative constitutional theory (the “hourglass model” of Jon Elster). The Icelandic case corroborates the predicted correlation between participation and rights provisions and democratic features in the resulting text. It also helps us identify the mechanism by which participation at the drafting stage likely caused such effects. The theoretical framework for the causal claim is the democratic theory framework known as “epistemic democracy,” whereby more inclusive decision processes (specifically more inclusive deliberative processes) are expected to make for better decisions. The paper simply applies this conceptual framework to the context of constitutional drafting.