Constitution-Building Bodies and the Sequencing of Public Participation A Comparison of Seven Empirical Cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Constitution-building is one of the most salient aspects of transitional processes, from war to peace or from authoritarian rule, in terms of establishing and strengthening democracy. This paper is part of a research project that aims to identify the circumstances under which constitution-building can strengthen democracy after violent conflict and during transitions from authoritarian rule. Previous research has indicated that the actions and relations of political elites from opposing political parties when making the constitution has bearing on the state of democracy post promulgation, but that the careful sequencing of public participation in the process can be of relevance as well. This paper conducts a systematic analysis of seven empirical cases and focuses the investigation to the type of constitution-building body that has been employed and to during what stage of the process the general public have been invited to participate. It concludes that popularly elected constitution-building bodies tend to include a broad range of political parties and that they, additionally, tend to have rules of procedure that encourage compromise and negotiation, whereas appointed bodies are dominated by one single party or one single person and do not have rules of procedure that necessitate compromise. The paper also discusses the potential need for political elites to have negotiated a number of baseline constitutional principles prior to inviting the general public to get involved in the constitution-building process, and concludes that this is an area of research in need of further in-depth empirical case-studies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".