Welcome to the COST Action “Constitution-making and deliberative democracy” of the COST Association with the support of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. COST Assoication (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding organisation for research and innovation networks, with 39 states as members.
Why is this Action important? In Europe and across the world, several countries are turning to deliberative democracy to reform their constitutions, and in many others this question is high on the political agenda. Such transformation also shuffles quite radically the role of the citizenry regarding constitutional changes. Traditionally such changes are the sole responsibility of elected officials, in collaboration with experts. With the deliberative turn, many more actors may be involved in the designing of constitutions: citizens both individually and collectively in the forms of informal associations, social movements, civil society organisations, participatory consultants and research teams.
The Main Aim of the Action is to bring together all these actors – who are usually not in contact – to discuss and reflect on this democratic challenge, not only in terms of normative ideals but also and above all on the empirical challenges raised by this complex and multi-faceted democratic transformation.
Because the focus of the Action is on constitutions and deliberative democracy, the Action itself as a network is intended to work in a deliberative fashion. This action has three research coordination objectives:
- To gather and organize information about all deliberative democracy experiments related to constitution-like issues, research and writing about constitutional deliberative democracy, and the actors involved in both;
- To make this information widely available and widely used;
- To promote interaction between actors involved in this area, and also interested actors who are not yet involved.
The Action’s Memorandum of Understanding with COST Association was signed on 13 April 2018. Research of the Action is thematically divided across 3 Working Groups: Constitution-making and deliberative Democracy – Theories and practices (WG1), Minority groups and constitutional deliberative democracy (WG2), and e-Constitutional deliberative democracy (WG3).
You may find additional information on our information sheet or on the website of COST for the Action. Feel free to contact us if you would like to participate as a Managmenet Committee member or substitute for the country in which the institution you are affiliated with is located, or simply as a participant in one of our Working Groups. Please note that the Action abides by all regulations of COST Association (relevant documentation can be found here), and especially by the COST Vademecum (the latest version of May 2020 can be found here).