Constitutional deliberative democracy and democratic innovations

• Main Authors: Geissel, Brigitte, Gherghina, Sergiu
• Other Authors: Reuchamps, Min, Suiter, Jane
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: ECPR Press 2016
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/145100/; http://press.ecpr.eu/book_details.asp?bookTitleID=395

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.