Deliberative Constitution-making

This book explains deliberative constitution-making with a special focus on the connections between participation, representation and legitimacy and provides a general overview of what the challenges and prospects of deliberative constitution-making are today. It seeks to provide a more complete picture of what is at stake as a political trend in various places in the world, both theoretically and empirically grounded. Distinctively, the book studies not only established democracies and well-known cases of deliberative constitution-making but also such practices in authoritarian and less consolidated democratic settings and departs from a traditional institutional perspective to have a special focus on actors, and in particular underrepresented groups. This book is of key interest to scholars and students of deliberative democracy, constitutional politics, democratization and autocratization studies, citizen participation and more broadly to comparative politics, public administration, social policy and law.

Min Reuchamps is a Professor of Political Science at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and Chair of the COST Action 'Constitution-making and deliberative democracy' (2018-2022). Yanina Welp is a Research fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Geneva Graduate Institute (Switzerland), and Chair of the COST Action 'Constitution-making and deliberative democracy' (2022-2023).

Introduction: Does it matter if constitution-making is deliberative? Yanina Welp & Min Reuchamps Chapter 1: The meanings of deliberation and citizen participation: representing the citizens in constitution-making processes Elena García-Guitián Chapter 2:Citizen deliberation and constitutional change Paul Blokker & Volkan Gül Chapter 3: From Deliberative Systems to Democracy Peter Stone Chapter 4: Gender and deliberative constitution-making Claudia Heiss & Monika Mokre Chapter 5: Ethnic Groups and Constitutional Deliberation: Understanding Participation in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Romania Sergiu Gherghina, Jasmin Hasic & Sergiu Miscoiu Chapter 6: 'Deliberating the Rights of the Child': The Inclusion of Children in Deliberative Democracy and Some Insights from Israel Daniella Zlotnik Raz & Shulamit Almog Chapter 7: Inclusiveness and effectiveness of digital participatory experiments in constitutional reforms Raphael Kies, Alina Östling, Visvaldis Valtenbergs, Sébastien Théron, Stéphanie Wojcik & Norbert Kerstin Chapter 8: Lessons from two island nations: Re-reading the Icelandic Deliberative Constitutional Process in light of the success of the Irish Constitutional Convention Eirikur Bergmann Chapter 9: Deliberative constitution-making and local participatory processes in Poland and Hungary Agnieszka Kampka & Daniel Oross Chapter 10: Can the decolonial be deliberative? Constitution-making and colonial contexts: Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands Jón Ólafsson Chapter 11: Constitutional referendums and deliberation: Direct democratic integrity in Russia, Italy, and Turkey Norbert Kersting Conclusion: Hopes and limits of deliberative and democratic constitution-making Yanina Welp