Inclusive Constitution Making and Religious Rights: Lessons from the Icelandic Experiment

The 2010–13 Icelandic constitutional process offers a unique opportunity to test the predictions of epistemic deliberative democrats (as well as some constitutional scholars) that more inclusive processes lead to better outcomes. After briefly retracing the religious history of Iceland and the steps of the recent constitutional process, the article thus compares three constitutional proposals drafted at about the same time to replace the 1944 Icelandic constitution. Two of these drafts were written by seven government experts; the third one was written by a group of 25 lay citizens, who further crowdsourced their successive drafts to the larger public. The article suggests that on the question of religious rights the crowdsourced constitutional proposal indeed led to a marginally “better” (more sophisticated and more liberal) constitutional document.