Constitutional referendums and randomly selected constitutional conventions

Disaffection with ‘politics as usual’ is rife right across the democratic world. Yet while many see hope in randomly selected assemblies or conventions, we need to be much clearer about when and where their use might be appropriate. Against this backdrop, this paper accepts that randomly selected conventions can have an important role to play in constitutional amendment referendums. However, it questions the idea that such conventions might also have an important role in constitutional replacement referendums. Conceptually, constitutional replacement involves the creation of a new legal order. It is about determining the basis on which a government will legitimately rule. But whether the members of a randomly selected convention have the right incentive to think seriously about what governing entails is at best an open question. We should, therefore, remain cautious about the idea of using randomly selected conventions in future constitutional replacement referendum processes.