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Participation, Inclusion, and the Democratic Content of Constitutions

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Abstract

Theories of participatory and deliberative democracy contend that participatory and inclusive constitution-making processes are more likely to generate democratic outcomes than the traditional, elite-led approaches. The empirical evidence, however, has remained inconclusive and the propositions mostly normative. Using an original data from 195 constitutions promulgated in 118 countries since 1974, this study examines the impact of participatory and inclusive processes on the democratic content of constitutions. Building on the recently developed conjectures in the literature, this study introduces two original measures for individual-level public participation and aggregate-level group inclusion in constitution-making processes. The statistical analysis provides compelling empirical evidence that increased public participation is associated with an increased number of democratic provisions in constitutions, indicating that broad participatory processes can improve the democratic content of constitutions. Group inclusion, however, is not a significant predictor of the content of constitutions. The findings offer empirical support for participatory and deliberative theories of democracy and their prediction on democratic outcomes of participatory processes.

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Notes

  1. For Verba, Schlozman and Brady (1995), participatory distortion is the difference between those that participate (for example, voters in an election) and the total population of those who could participate (for example, eligible voters).

  2. The first stage of constitution-making is origination in which constitution drafters are elected or appointed. The second stage, deliberation, includes deliberation and the actual writing of the constitution. The last stage, ratification, covers the mechanism of approving the constitution draft (Eisenstadt et al. 2017b).

  3. Major groups here include all relevant political parties, blocs, and movements, interest groups, civil society organizations, as well as ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups. A process is considered inclusive if all of these groups are present and non-inclusive if major groups are systematically excluded.

  4. Portugal (1976) has a score of 2 (on a 0–6 scale) in the participation measure of this study and is coded as “mixed.” However, its score of inclusion is 6 (on a 0–6 scale) and it is coded as “inclusive.”

  5. To measure levels of participation and inclusion, two coders coded all 195 constitution-making processes and a third coder coded only the cases where the first two coders differed (9% of the cases). Coders consulted several sources including William S. Hein & Company (2012), Widner (2004), Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s Constitutionnet.org, Comparative Constitutions Project, Economist Intelligence Unit country reports, and the CIA World Fact Book. A few cases, such as Afghanistan or Somalia, required additional research from peer reviewed area studies journals.

  6. The additive approach to categorizing participation and inclusion variables suggests that this study treats each stage as equally important. Although a previous study (Eisenstadt et al. 2015) suggests that participation in the origination stage is more important for democracy, this article assumes that democratic constitutions require public participation and the inclusion of different societal groups in all three stages of constitution-making.

  7. Table 9 in the Appendix shows the descriptive statistics for participation and inclusion variables.

  8. The CCP dataset sample includes all independent states from 1789 to 2013, but the current release covers only 52% of those country-years which is 105 (out of 195) observations in this article. Using the CCP codebook rules, two coders independently coded the content of the missing constitutions in my dataset and a third coder coded only the cases where the first two coders differed.

  9. As many established democracies do not have guarantees of social welfare in their constitutions, this study does not use them as proxies of democracy.

  10. Since the state of emergency variable is a negative measure of rights, I recoded it so that 1 indicates a constitution that does not allow for suspension or restriction of rights during states of emergency.

  11. I also tested the impact of participation and inclusion in each stage of constitution-making to explore whether there is a stage at which participation/inclusion are most consequential. The results (Table 10 in the Appendix) show that while participation in the origination and ratification stages are statistically significant, inclusion is only marginally significant in the origination stage, indicating that origination is perhaps the most consequential stage for democratic constitutions.

  12. Table 14 in the Appendix reports the results for the Democratic Content outcome, using OLS and Poisson regressions.

  13. The measure for regime type variable is based on Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland’s Democracy-dictatorship index (Cheibub et al. 2010).

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank David Doherty, Todd Eisenstadt, Zachary Elkins, Donald Horowitz, Carl LeVan, Ghazal P. Nadi, Diane Singerman, Ryan T. Moore, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This article benefited from feedback received at University of Illinois, Chicago’s Political Science Speaker Series (2018) and George Washington University’s Comparative Politics Workshop (2015). With special thanks to Muhammet Asil, Samantha Costas, and Paul Olander for their help with data collection.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Loyola University Chicago, 1032 W Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL, 60660, USA

    Tofigh Maboudi

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Appendix. Coding rules, descriptive tables, and additional analysis

Appendix. Coding rules, descriptive tables, and additional analysis

Table 7 Coding Criteria for Participation Variable
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Table 8 Coding Criteria for Inclusion Variable
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Table 9 Descriptive Statistics of Participation and Inclusion Variables
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Table 10 The Impact of Different Stages of Participation and Inclusion on the Content of Constitutions
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Table 11 Large Sample Model
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Table 12 The Impact of Participation and Inclusion on the Content of Constitutions (including New States)
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Table 13 The Impact of Participation and Inclusion on the Content of Constitutions (with Interaction Term)
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Table 14 The Impact of Participation and Inclusion on the Content of Constitutions (OLS and Poisson Models)
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Maboudi, T. Participation, Inclusion, and the Democratic Content of Constitutions. St Comp Int Dev 55, 48–76 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-019-09298-x

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