Developing Democracy through Citizen Engagement: The Advent of Popular Participation in UK Constitution-Making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at citizen assembly-style constitutional conventions as a path towards revitalising representative democratic institutions. Such conventions were notoriously set up in British Columbia, The Netherlands, Ontario, Iceland and Ireland; the Scottish Government promised one for an independent Scotland, and calls for a United Kingdom-wide convention remain strong following the Scottish referendum. The assumption behind such calls has been that direct citizen engagement in constitutional revision processes will supplement or even replace traditional political institutions and thereby invigorate democracy. Involving the people in constitution-drafting, the argument goes, actualises the hitherto mythical ‘people’ and turns self-government into an empirical reality. This article seeks to test this assumption. While acknowledging the numerous potential benefits of citizen assemblies in constitution-making, it is suggested that more thought is necessary before advocating them as a one-size-fits-all solution to the woes of representative democracy. To begin with, they need to be seen as legitimate themselves. This will involve complex decisions over inclusiveness, allocated resources and over how to define their success. For example, would a highly participatory process suffice even if the resulting proposals are not adopted? Furthermore, the democratic potential of constitutional conventions may be frustrated in the likely event of certain options being a priori taken off the table. For instance, would a United Kingdom-wide constitutional convention have been worthy of its name working under a mandate as limited as that of the Smith Commission? Finally, one must remember that the costs of popular constitution-making, including in terms of political will and citizen interest, will unavoidably render constitutional conventions exceptional. The majority of constitutional reforms are bound to come about via more traditional channels. Thus, focusing solely on popular involvement in times of crisis may be short-sighted and ultimately detrimental. If democracy is a work in progress, it is still representative democracy that we are working towards improving, including via boosts of participatory activity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".