When Do Innovative Constitution-Making Bodies Generate Constitutional Innovations?

Recent years have seen major innovations in processes of constitution-making. Iceland became the first modern democracy to establish a directly elected constituent assembly alongside its regular legislature. The Netherlands, Ireland, and several Canadian provinces established assemblies composed in part or whole of randomly selected citizens to consider constitutional and other institutional reforms. These cases and others have made innovative use of the internet to extend engagement beyond the assemblies’ members. These constitution-making assemblies in themselves embody major democratic innovation. Existing studies (e.g., Fournier et al.; Suiter et al.; Bergmann) suggest they have advanced important democratic qualities connected to both participation and deliberation. They have also propounded major governance innovations in their proposals. In addition, however, they have faced significant problems. First, translation of the assemblies’ proposals into actual institutional reform has proved very difficult. Second, and even more fundamentally, there are questions over when politicians are willing to permit the creation of such innovative constitution-making bodies in the first place. Thus, while in principle such assemblies appear to constitute important democratic innovations, in practice there are doubts as to whether they can fulfil this potential. The proposed paper examines this apparent gap between theory and reality by addressing three related questions. First, what are the circumstances in which politicians are more or less likely to agree to the creation of innovative constitution-making bodies with worthwhile agendas? Second, what are the circumstances in which politicians feel bound to facilitate implementation of these bodies’ recommendations? Third, specifically, what are the features in the design of such constitution-making bodies that make it more or less likely that their recommendations will spur real change? Answers are sought to these questions through a combination of comparative analysis across thirty-one European democracies and detailed case studies from Canada, Ireland, Iceland, and the UK.