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Zeisberg on Democratic Processualism

By Lawrence Solum

Mariah Zeisberg (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Department of Political Science) has posted Democratic Processualism on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This book review accepts Stephen Elkin?s Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design After Madison methodological invitation to consider the meaning of constitutional values through their institutional expressions. The paper develops a concept called ?democratic processualism,? which pertains to the capacity of institutions to elicit reasons for public policy that are the appropriate grounds for those policies. While the concept of democratic processualism is implicit in theoretical work on deliberative democracy, it has not been explicitly articulated and defended. I argue that democratic processualism can serve as a praxis concept, providing a way to evaluate the legitimacy of governmental processes while also opening constitutional theory to empirical investigation about the extent to which institutions can and do foster the processualist ideal.

Highly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 29, 2010 (boomark / email).