The 2023 Embedded Scholars have been preparing for their summer work abroad through a new government course created for the program — Research in Democratic and Constitutional Development — taught by Ashley Moran. The course delves into issues in democratization, constitutional design, and democracy assistance, engaging students in research in these areas. This semester, the students worked with Professor Moran and the Comparative Constitutions Project to design a new deliberative consultation framework to research public views on constitutional issues.

The new approach seeks to address challenges inherent in public consultation generally and in constitutional design specifically. Members of the public often have limited knowledge of current constitutional features, potential alternatives, and their impact on sociopolitical dynamics, making it difficult to use traditional surveys or focus groups to assess their views on complex constitutional issues. A deliberative framework, however, provides an opportunity to inform participants on the issues while assessing their views.

Such deliberative consultations have rarely been used for constitutional issues, though, given the large scope of issues typically under debate in constitutional design. The new deliberative consultation framework developed in this class seeks to address this by developing a method for a scalable deliberative event that allows more regular and widespread public consultation on constitutional issues.

The approach uses data from Constitute—an indexed repository of the world’s constitutions—to consult communities on their constitutional priorities, the challenges they see as most pressing, and new ideas for addressing them. It thus provides insight into the sociopolitical challenges that members of the public see as most important and the constitutional approaches they favor to address them.

Students presented the research to International IDEA this spring to share the consultation model as an option for future consultations in the field. With the completion of their course this spring, the 2023 fellows head to Chile and Panama to work for International IDEA on democracy and election assistance programs this summer.