Author Interview: The Veil of Participation

Alexander Hudson

International IDEA

Tell us a little bit about the book.  

Public participation is a vital part of constitution-making processes worldwide, but we know very little about the extent to which participation actually affects constitutional texts. In this book, I set out to systematically measure the impact of public participation in three much-cited cases – Brazil, South Africa, and Iceland – and to explain the variation between these cases with reference to the larger political processes involved. To that end, I introduce a theory of party-mediated public participation. The core argument is that public participation has limited potential to affect the constitutional text but that the effectiveness of participation varies with the political context. The strength of the political parties involved in the process is the key factor, as strong political parties are unlikely to incorporate public input. In contrast, weaker parties are comparatively more responsive to public input. This party-mediation thesis presents a challenge to the contemporary consensus on the design of constitution-making processes (in which public participation is a core goal) and places new emphasis on the role of political parties. 

What inspired you to take up this project?  

The most accurate answer (but perhaps not the most engaging) proceeds in several steps. I came to this study from an earlier interest in peacebuilding – particularly in the context of intrastate conflict. It seemed to me that drafting a new constitution was one of the pivotal moments in conflict resolution. The question that interested me most was: under what conditions would a new constitution be viewed as legitimate by the various parties to the conflict? As I started to read both academic and practitioner literature, the connection between public participation and legitimacy grabbed my attention. This prompted me to wonder: to what extent does public participation actually matter for the constitution's content? It turned out that we did not yet have an answer for that question – and so I set out to try and answer it. 

Whose work was influential on you throughout the project? 

As my research spans public law and comparative politics, there are many important influences. Ran Hirschl and Tom Ginsburg have been hugely influential on my fundamental view of the relationship between constitutional law and politics. Zachary Elkins has had the greatest influence on how I approach research and the questions that I ask. Closer to the book's main themes, Vivien Hart and Jon Elster certainly influenced how I think about constitution-making. As I was writing, the works of Hélène Landemore, Gabriel Negretto, Todd Eisenstadt, Carl LeVan, and Tofigh Maboudi were also always near to hand.  

What challenges did you face in writing the book? 

The first significant challenge concerned data collection. I was able to gain access to a lot of the documents from South Africa’s constitution-making process via the Internet and actually through an interlibrary loan from the University of Cape Town. However, getting access to the Brazilian texts I was interested in required some networking and several people's generous assistance. I was lucky enough to be able to do field research in both Brazil and South Africa, but getting interviews with some of the key people involved in the constitution-making processes that had taken place a couple of decades before required a bit of persistence. Collecting data and completing interviews in Iceland was much easier as the events are more recent. There were also significant methodological challenges in connecting the content of the submissions from the public with the constitution's content. Then there were further methodological challenges in scaling the case studies up to a cross-national statistical analysis.   

What do you hope to see as the book’s contribution to academic discourse and constitutional or public law more broadly? 

I hope the book contributes to our understanding of the role of public participation, particularly in constitution-making, but also in the many other fora in which members can comment on legal or political changes. As we see the proliferation of citizens’ assemblies and other new forms of political participation, the same issues concerning the connection between public input and policy output apply. Perhaps the book's central findings are not unsurprising for those who have worked in a constitution-making process in the past. However, they require us to think more carefully about how we motivate participation programmes. I also hope the book will be useful for practitioners. In the last chapter, I try to apply some of the lessons from the research to the practical matter of how we design constitution-drafting processes.  

What’s next? 

The research in this book raised many new questions for me around the sociological legitimacy of constitutions. I have already started some new experimental research on the determinants of individual perceptions of constitutional legitimacy. I also remain engaged with a couple of other projects around constitutional referenda.  

Alexander Hudson is a Democracy Assessment Specialist at International IDEA.