Deliberation and Constitution Making

Constituent assemblies may involve deliberative democracy in two ways. On the one hand, deliberation among democratically elected delegates may be part of the process of adopting the constitution. On the other hand, promoting deliberative democracy may be one of the goals of the framers. In this essay I consider only the first aspect. I shall proceed as follows. In Section 1, I present some stylized facts about constitutions and constitution making. In Section 2, I try to characterize the deliberative setting as an institutional structure. In Section 3, the substantive core of the essay, I consider deliberation in some early constituent assemblies. In Section 4, I draw some normative conclusions.