Democratic Constitutional Design

Sævar Finnbogason talks to Jón Ólafsson and Valgerður Björk Pálsdóttir from the DCD research team about the lessons from the Deliberative Poll on the constitution of Iceland, convened by Icelandic Government, where 230 Randomly selected Icelanders participated in a productive Deliberative meeting.  Will the poll influence policy and will Althingi be able to agree on any changes to the constitution? Will the political reality in Iceland and opposition from supporters of the Constitutional Council bill from 2011 prevent changes from succeeding.   

Is participatory deliberative democracy suited for long term decision-making? Maija Setälä and her colleagues are currently working with our regional government in south-east Finland where the goal is to involve citizens in long term planning for the region. The deliberations involve working with future scenarios and different types of participation including a citizen assembly. Can randomly selected citizens come up with good long-term policies or is that something only elected representatives can do?

Referendums raise questions about voters’ access to reliable information and considered arguments in this age of social media and polarization. In this episode Sævar Finnbogason talks to professor Maija Setälä from the University of Turku, about Citizens Review panels and citizens initiatives. Maija and her colleagues recently carried out an experiment with a citizen’s review panel in Finland, based on the Oregon CIR model. 

Citizen Assemblies and Deliberative Polls on various issues have been conducted in many countries all over the world and there is also growing interest in other forms of Sortition mini-publics. In the second part of our talk with professor David Farrell we discuss this development and the promise it might hold for the future.

Following the financial crisis of 2008 Iceland and Ireland embarked on constructional revisions. In the episode Sævar Finnbogason talks to professor David Farrell about the main differences between the two countries approaches. David is the project leader for the Irish Citizen Assembly and has advised the Irish government on all three citizen assemblies held in Ireland.

Are online good deliberations and crowdsourcing on political issues possible? Seeing how things often work on Social Media it seems we need platforms designed specifically with that in mind. In the first episode of the DCD Podcast Jón Ólafsson speaks to Róbert Bjarnason from the Citizens Foundation, who have been designing software for online crowdsourcing and deliberations for a decade and is now facilitating online constitutional crowdsourcing in Iceland.