CA17135 - Constitution-making and deliberative democracy (DeliberativeConstitution-Making)

In Europe and across the world, several countries are turning to deliberative democracy to reform their constitutions, and in many others this question is high on the political agenda. Such transformation also shuffles quite radically the role of the citizenry regarding constitutional changes. Traditionally such changes are the sole responsibility of elected officials, in collaboration with experts. With the deliberative turn, many more actors may be involved in the designing of constitutions: citizens both individually and collectively in the forms of informal associations, social movements, civil society organisations, participatory consultants and research teams. The Main Aim of the Action is to bring together all these actors – who are usually not in contact – to discuss and reflect on this democratic challenge, not only in terms of normative ideals but also and above all on the empirical challenges raised by this complex and multi-faceted democratic transformation.

Because the focus of ConstDeb is on constitutions and deliberative democracy, the Action itself as a network is intended to work in a deliberative fashion.

This action has three research coordination objectives:

1. To gather and organize information about all deliberative democracy experiments related to constitution-like issues, research and writing about constitutional deliberative democracy, and the actors involved in both;
2. To make this information widely available and widely used;
3. To promote interaction between actors involved in this area, and also interested actors who are not yet involved.

The primary vehicle to achieve these objectives will be a deliberative portal.