Hélène Landemore, Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University, attempts to answer the question, "What is a good constitution?" by looking at the case of Iceland’s “crowdsourced constitution,” which came close to becoming the new law of the land in 2013. She considers various normative criteria by which to assess the quality of a constitution prior to its implementation and uses some of them to evaluate the Icelandic proposal in their light. In order to set a plausible benchmark, she also compares this constitutional proposal with three other texts: the original 1944 constitution, and two expert-written proposals that served as templates for the members of the Constitutional Council. The idea is to evaluate the quality of a constitution, prior to its implementation, by reference to ex-ante, substantive criteria that are both sufficiently demanding and realistic in terms of what is feasible at any given time. 

Hélène Landemore is the author of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press 2013) and co-editor with Jon Elster of Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press 2012). Her work has appeared in Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory, and Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. She is currently working on various projects, including a book manuscript on "post-representative democracy."

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