Dr. Jurgen Goossens
- CV
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Postdoctoral research project: Direct Democracy and Constitutional Change. Do the People have an inalienable and unconstrained right to alter the Constitution?
Authors and policymakers have indicated that there is a crisis of democracy. At the same time,
however, a debate is going on about revitalising democracy through citizen participation. There
has particularly been a proliferation of direct democracy to pursue constitutional change. Several
referendums took place and randomly selected citizens were involved in innovative projects to
rewrite the Constitution. Nevertheless, this wave of citizen participation in shaping constitutional
foundations and values, which lies at the heart of democracy, has not yet sufficiently been
analysed.
Therefore, this project will conduct a comparative legal analysis regarding the suitability and
necessary constraints of popular constitutional law-making, which may be useful for constitutional
designers, legislatures, judges and the People themselves. The project will tackle four main topics:
(1) do citizens have an inalienable right to alter or abolish the Constitution based on popular
sovereignty and is it democratically legitimate to exclude the People?, (2) which constitutional
topics are suitable to be subjected to direct democracy?, (3) which procedural safeguards are
necessary to enable legitimate and effective popular constitution-making, and which specific
conditions are necessary to protect the rights of minorities or the interests of federated states?,
and (4) what role, if any, should the legislature and the courts have when the People are directly
involved in changing the Constitution?