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

自1980年代以来，公众直接参与宪法起草进程已变得越来越普遍，现在已成为世界各地此类进程的标准要素。然而，我们仍然不了解这些参与机会的实际影响。 这一项目的核心问题是，公众通过全民协商和书面意见的参与何时对宪法最后文本产生影响，以及产生多大影响。该项目将利用最先进的文本分析技术，对巴西和南非公民提交给制宪会议的提案以及制宪会议产生的宪法文本进行分类、建模和分析。除了对宪法文本文字的直接影响外，本研究项目还将考虑公众评论和请愿可能通过制宪会议的议程设置对宪法内容产生影响的更间接的方式。除了对文本数据进行定量分析之外，还将与制宪会议成员和协助其工作的支助人员进行访谈，并在可能的情况下与参与的公众进行访谈。从定量文本分析中获得的见解将与参与这一过程的人提供的说明进行比较，最终得出公众参与在这些宪法的制定中发挥的作用的完整说明。

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.