Iceland’s 5 Lessons: Failed Crowd-Sourced Constitution

 

 

We, All of the People by Hélène Landemore, assistant professor of political science at Yale. Excerpted from the article:

 

Who should write the constitution of a democratic country and, indeed, any country?  The answer seems obvious: its people.  Yet the constitutions of existing states, including democratic ones, have usually been written by small, rather unrepresentative subsets of individuals.  Solon is supposed to have single-handedly laid out the foundations of democratic Athens.  The U.S. Constitution was penned by a few dozen white men.  More recent examples of constitutional processes involve the usual elites: professional politicians and state bureaucrats.  But even elected or otherwise democratically authorized constitutional drafters are at best metaphorically, “We, the People.”

 

From the Wiley online Library, more on this topic (place URL in your browser):

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopp.12032/abstract;jsessionid=4B233AC780DE78F31E7C1E77F4926DA0.f01t03