7. Let the People In! Lessons from a Modern Viking Saga

Abstract

This chapter assesses the real-life case study of Iceland to illustrate some of the principles of open democracy. It closely examines the 2010–13 Icelandic constitutional process from which many of the ideas behind this book originally stem. Despite its apparent failure — the constitutional proposal has yet to be turned into law — the Icelandic constitutional process created a precedent for both new ways of writing a constitution and envisioning democracy. The process departed from representative, electoral democracy as we know it in the way it allowed citizens to set the agenda upstream of the process, write the constitutional proposal or at least causally affect it via online comments, and observe most of the steps involved. The chapter also shows that the procedure was not simply inclusive and democratic but also successful in one crucial respect — it produced a good constitutional proposal. This democratically written proposal indeed compares favorably to both the 1944 constitution it was meant to replace and competing proposals written by experts at about the same time.