While the constitutional reform process in Iceland received a considerable amount of attention in the foreign media the failure of the reform process has received hardly any mention. Adopting the new constitution required two votes in parliament with an election held in the interim. However, the session came to an end without a vote on the constitution. Instead the parliamentary party leaders negotiated an agreement about a procedure for amending the constitution in a new session of parliament following the upcoming parliamentary election to be held on April 27.
Lawyers & Constitutions
In Constitution on February 14, 2013 at 5:16 amBrowsing the last 40 years of the European Journal of Political Research (don’t ask why!) I noticed this bit about political scientists, jurists, and constitution. I’ve tried to make the same point here before but Maurice Duverger (1980) does it far more elegantly than I have:
It is not usual for political scientists to construct analytical models defined initially by constitutions. However, no-one would dream of watching a game of football or of bridge without taking into account the rules of the game. They constitute a fundamental aspect of the players’ strategy and tactics, the framework of which they define. Jurists have obscured this deep nature of constitutions by considering them as sacred texts, capable of only one interpretation, which would be “true”, while the others were “false”. What I mean of course is that each commentator believes his interpretation – which differs from that of his colleagues ~ to be the only true one. In actual fact, the interpretation of a constitution cannot be separated from the interrelationship of political forces to which it is applied. If the interrelationship varies, the structure and functioning of the form of government established by the constitution vary at the same time.
What was the Report about?
In Constitution on January 8, 2013 at 8:57 amIn previous posts I have criticized the lack of consultation with political scientists in the constitutional reform process. I have further documented my concerns in comments to the legislative committee (in Icelandic) in charge of dealing with the proposal. Others, including the President of Iceland in his New Year’s address, have echoed these concerns. Naturally, the president’s address drew far more attention to the issue than my comments. As before several proponents of the proposed constitutions, including my former colleagues Thorvaldur Gylfason and Svanur Kristjansson, whose response has essentially been that the proposed constitution has been endorsed by the foremost experts on constitutions in a report on the proposal which can be found here. That struck me as strange and I re-read the report.