{"id":23,"date":"2011-01-31T20:48:06","date_gmt":"2011-01-31T20:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/?p=23"},"modified":"2011-01-31T21:58:44","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T21:58:44","slug":"re-electing-the-assembly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"Re-electing the Assembly?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week the Icelandic Supreme Court ruled the election to the Constitutional Assembly null and void. \u00c2\u00a0One can naturally debate the reasons the Court cited (various administrative errors, e.g., ballot boxes not having locks) but I’m not particularly interested in arguing about those. \u00c2\u00a0The interesting question, of course, is “What now?” \u00c2\u00a0One option is to simply hold the election again. \u00c2\u00a0Another option that has been voiced is to do without an election and having parliament simply appoint the members elected in the voided election. <\/em><\/p>\n

While the latter option has the benefit of being far cheaper, it strikes me as a bad idea. \u00c2\u00a0And I say that even though I think it unlikely that the flaws in the administration of the elections influenced the outcome. \u00c2\u00a0I think it is very likely the outcome of a new election would be very similar to the voided one. \u00c2\u00a0Then, why bother? \u00c2\u00a0The reason is that a constitution is just a piece of paper. \u00c2\u00a0To a large degree, constitutions only matter because people accept them as prescribing the rules of the game. \u00c2\u00a0This may sound strange to Icelanders where discourse about the constitution has always had a very legalistic tone – the question that is always asked is what the law (or constitution) says. \u00c2\u00a0This, in my opinion, is a fundamentally wrong approach to thinking about politics and how to set rules of the game. \u00c2\u00a0One doesn’t have to look far to see why the legalistic approach falls short. \u00c2\u00a0 According to the Icelandic constitution, the president has a legislative veto. \u00c2\u00a0However, article 13, “The President entrusts his authority to Ministers” and for about six decades no president exercised the veto power. \u00c2\u00a0But one day the president did and effectively transformed Iceland from a parliamentary system to a semi-presidentialist one. \u00c2\u00a0Admittedly, as the discourse about the use of the veto highlighted, this was an instance of an ambiguity in the relevant constitutional provisions rather than a political actor choosing to violate the constitution but it highlights the fact political interests, and opportunities, shape how political actors choose to interpret constitutions. \u00c2\u00a0 Again, this was not an instance in which a political actor chose to break constitutional provisions (although some legal scholars might consider that to be the case) but one of the reasons we haven’t seen that happen in Iceland is that everyone accepts that the constitution sets the, sometimes ambiguous, rules of the game.<\/p>\n

So, the question is what would politics be like if not everyone accepted the rules of the game provided by the constitution? \u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know the answer to that but I would be inclined to err on the side of caution. \u00c2\u00a0And this means holding another election. \u00c2\u00a0If parliament decides to appoint the members elected in the voided election it would only serve to undermine the legitimacy of the constitutional assembly. \u00c2\u00a0It may be the case that it is a fairly small minority that really considered the administration of the election serious enough to void and even that the case was brought for political reasons but that is largely irrelevant. \u00c2\u00a0It is simply important to build a broad consensus about process of drawing up a new constitution. \u00c2\u00a0Undoubtedly there will be disagreements about the constitution that is produced in the end but it will not help if the process is seen as lacking legitimacy.<\/p>\n

Rather than seeing this as a step backwards, it should be seen as a new opportunity. \u00c2\u00a0Parliament will, presumably, \u00c2\u00a0need to write a new bill to establish a constitutional assembly and, this time, maybe they can do it right. \u00c2\u00a0As I have argued in previous posts, it is nothing short of ridiculous to give the constitutional assembly only two (or four, if extended) months, to come up with a new constitution. \u00c2\u00a0Its members need to have time to learn about how political institutions work if they are to do a decent job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week the Icelandic Supreme Court ruled the election to the Constitutional Assembly null and void. \u00c2\u00a0One can naturally debate the reasons the Court cited (various administrative errors, e.g., ballot boxes not having locks) but I’m not particularly interested in arguing about those. \u00c2\u00a0The interesting question, of course, is “What now?” \u00c2\u00a0One option is to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.constitutionalassembly.politicaldata.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}