Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of Public Participation in Constitution Making

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Direct public participation in the constitution-­drafting process has become more and more common since the 1980s, and is now a standard element of such processes around the world. Yet, we remain ignorant of the actual impact of these opportunities for participation. The central question in this project is when, and how much, impact public participation through popular consultations and written submissions has on the final text of the constitution. This project will utilize cutting-­edge text analysis techniques to classify, model, and analyze the proposals that citizens of Brazil and South Africa sent to their constituent assemblies as well as the constitutional text these assemblies produced. Beyond the direct impact on the words of the constitutional text, this research project will also consider the more indirect ways in which public comments and petitions may have influenced the content of the constitution through agenda setting in the constituent assemblies. This quantitative analysis of the textual data will be supplemented with interviews with members of the constituent assemblies and the support staff that facilitated their work, and where possible, with the members of the public who participated. Insights gained from the quantitative text analysis will be compared with the accounts given by those involved in the process, in the end producing a complete account of the role that public participation played in the creation of these constitutions.