Innovative, Inclusive, and Deliberative? Assessing the Democratic Quality of Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution

Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution, established by a resolution of the Irish Parliament in 2012, can be described as a ‘hybrid’ mini-public as it included randomly selected ‘lay’ citizens and political representatives in a deliberative forum to make recommendations on constitutional issues ranging from amending the electoral system to introducing same sex marriage. This paper examines the democratic quality of this unusual form of democratic innovation. Focusing on theories of deliberative democracy, it is particularly concerned with the ‘democratic goods’ of inclusion and considered judgement (Smith 2009) that can contribute to the ‘throughput’ legitimacy of a democratic system or process. When the Convention was first established concerns were expressed that the more experienced political representatives would dominate the discussions at the expense of inclusion and deliberative quality. This paper empirically tests whether this has been the case. Reflecting these concerns and drawing on the work of Schmidt (2013) it hypothesises that gains in output legitimacy (outcomes and impact) come at the expense of throughput legitimacy namely participation and deliberative quality. Re-conceptualizing democratic quality in line with democratic innovation design, it measures participation in terms of frequency of speech and decision making rules and deliberative quality by tracking information gains and opinion change as well as capturing perceptions of deliberative quality using the PDQI (perception of deliberative quality index). The PDQI, a tool derived from Steenbergen et al.’s (2003) index to measure the quality of deliberation (DQI) using Habermasian principles of discourse ethics, not only captures individual perceptions of freedom to participate and respectful listening, it also ‘gives an appreciation of the deliberativeness of others in the group’ (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2014: 107) and is therefore appropriate in this ‘mixed’ setting. It is anticipated that the findings will contribute to our understanding of how specific democratic innovations contribute to democratic qualities.