Constitutional Deliberative Democracy and Democratic Innovations
Min Reuchamps and Jane Suiter (eds.), Constitutional Deliberative Democracy in Europe, Colchester: ECPR Press, 2016.
16 Pages Posted: 24 Feb 2016 Last revised: 5 May 2018
Date Written: February 22, 2016
Abstract
Citizens increasingly obtained the opportunity of consultation and input during the constitutional reform. The variety of these consultation processes leads to several inter-connected question: How did these consultation processes work? What are the effects of these deliberative processes in comparative perspective? Do these effects match with findings on participatory innovations in general? This chapter seeks to provide some answers by embedding constitution reforms through popular involvement in the broader topic of democratic innovations. We start with a discussion of frameworks for the analysis and explain our decision to suggest a new framework. Then we comparatively evaluate the three case studies on constitutional deliberative procedures (Belgium, Iceland, Ireland) referring to input legitimacy, throughput legitimacy and output legitimacy. Finally, we embed the findings into the debate about the effects of democratic innovations in general.
Keywords: constitution, deliberation, democratic innovations, legitimacy
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