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

自20世纪80年代以来，公众直接参与宪法制定过程越来越普遍，目前已成为世界各国宪法制定过程的一个标准要素。然而，我们仍然不了解这些参与机会的实际影响。该项目的核心问题是，通过公众协商和书面提交的公众参与对宪法最终文本的影响何时以及有多大。该项目将利用尖端的文本分析技术对巴西和南非公民提交给制宪会议的提案进行分类、建模和分析，以及制宪会议产生的宪法文本。除了对宪法文本文字的直接影响之外，本研究项目还将考虑公众评论和请愿可能通过制宪会议议程设置影响宪法内容的更间接的方式。在对文本数据进行定量分析的同时，还将与各制宪议会成员和协助其工作的支助工作人员进行面谈，并在可能的情况下与参与的公众进行面谈。从定量文本分析中获得的见解将与参与这一进程的人给出的描述进行比较，最终产生公众参与在制定这些宪法中所起作用的完整描述。

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.