Dr. Richard Elliott has won a Spark Grant from the SNSF
We are proud to announce that Richard Elliott has won a Spark Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for his project “Modelling Constitutional Conventions in a Changing Political Dynamic”.
The Spark funding scheme has just recently been introduced by the SNSF to support new scientific approaches and unconventional projects. Successful applicants receive between 50’000 to 100’000 CHF of funding.
The project description of Richard Elliott's ‘Modelling Constitutional Conventions in a Changing Political Dynamic’:
"Democratic constitutional design poses a difficult challenge for contemporary states. There is a growing demand for popular participation in the process of constitutional reform (at a theoretical and at a practical level).
Governments are increasingly turning to democratic theorists for guidance about how to incorporate citizens into this process. The idea of the constitutional convention has been revived and expanded in line with the principles of deliberative democracy order to make it more open, inclusive, and democratic. And theorists have begun to argue for the need to structure deliberation in line with a series of ideal deliberative constraints.
Our research project calls these constraints into question, arguing that a more flexible model of deliberation generates a more democratic procedure in a realistic (dynamic) setting. It will run different models of democratic deliberation against one another in an experimental context and collect survey data from participants in order to assess the best way to structure constitutional conventions. Ultimately, this project aims to generate concrete recommendations for policy makers and constitutional reformers, alongside new insights for academic political theorists."