1st Edition

Deliberative Constitution-making Opportunities and Challenges

Edited By Min Reuchamps, Yanina Welp Copyright 2023
    236 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    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 Kersting

    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

    Biography

    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).