Practical Considerations for Public Participation in Constitution-Building: What, When, How and Why?

Abstract

Public participation has become a core element of modern constitution-building. Robust participation is credited with a range of benefits—from improving individual behaviours and attitudes to democracy to shaping elite bargaining dynamics, improving constitutional content, and strengthening outcomes for democracy and peace. Yet it is not well understood whether and how public participation can achieve these ends. Much of what we think we know about participatory constitution-building remains theoretical. No two processes are alike, and there is no agreed definition of what constitutes a ‘participatory process’. Yet national decision-makers must contend with the key question: What does a robust participation process look like for a particular country, at a particular time, in a particular context? What considerations and principles can be derived from comparative experience to guide decisions? This Policy Paper unpacks the forms and functions of public participation across different stages of the constitution-building process and considers the ways in which public engagement can influence the dynamics of the process, including political negotiations.

Women and Constitutional Reform in Response to Social Crisis: Second Annual Women Constitution-Makers’ Dialogue, 2020

“…As in Chile, the Iceland process faced a number of political and legal challenges and ultimately failed to replace the existing constitution. Also like Chile, however, the government's response successfully served to quell the protests and transform protest into political debate (see Houlihan and Bisarya 2021;Hudson 2017). to pursue accession to the European Union despite broad public support for that course.…”

“…Another crucial set of decisions relate to the nature and extent of formal public consultation opportunities that will be provided. Most modern constitutionmaking processes involve some degree of public consultation, which significantly impacts women's overall participation and can be important for securing women's substantive concerns within the constitutional text (Houlihan and Bisarya 2021). But several factors impact women's ability to effectively engage in public consultations.…”

Reassessing Public Participation in Constitution-Making Processes

“…67 In any case, material inequalities likely mean that groups with more access to resources disproportionately impact the constitution-making process. 68 At times, public participation allows powerful interest groups to manipulate the process, 69 particularly affecting minorities and less organized groups.…”

Measuring constitutional preferences: A new method for analyzing public consultation data

“…These consultations typically solicit open-ended public comments, an unstructured approach that presents significant analytic challenges [1][2][3]. Such public input generates volumes of text [4] that are often unwieldy to analyze and inaccessible to policy makers and interest groups. For example, preceding the 1987-1988 Brazilian Constituent Assembly, the federal government asked citizens to submit proposals by postcard, resulting in a mountain of 72,719 postcards that looked impressive in photos but was of limited use to delegates [5].…”