The deliberative constitutionalism debate and a republican way forward

Abstract

Constitutionalists and deliberative democrats show increasing interest in deliberative constitutionalism. They seek to reconcile two prima facie conflicting camps in legal and political philosophy: constitutionalism and democracy. These concepts’ internal tensions, have led deliberativists to theorise on constitutional matters unsystematically, and constitutionalists to largely ignore the influential deliberative turn in political philosophy of the past four decades. Scholars want to put this in the past. Nowadays, deliberative constitutionalism is explicitly presented as a clear and distinct idea that keeps those tensions at bay. With this in the background, this article does three things: It first describes the state-of-the art in deliberative constitutionalism. Second, it shows the limitations of the current literature. Finally, it proposes an alternative conception of deliberative constitutionalism as a suggestion that may cope with those limitations based on a republican understanding of representative deliberative democracy.