Breaking the Constitutional Deadlock: Lessons from Deliberative Experiments in Constitutional Change

This work provides comparative insights into how deliberation on proposed constitutional amendments might be more effectively pursued. It reports on a new nationwide survey of public attitudes to constitutional reform, examining the potential in Australia of innovative Canadian models of reform led by Citizens' Assemblies. Assembly members are selected at random and are demographically representative of the wider public. They deliberate over reforms for several months while receiving instruction from experts in relevant fields. Members thus become 'public-experts': citizens who stand in for the wider public but are versed in constitutional fundamentals. The author finds striking empirical evidence that, if applied in the Australian context, public trust would be substantially greater for Citizens' Assemblies compared with traditional processes of change. The article sets these results in context, reading the Assemblies against theories of deliberative democracy and public trust. One reason for greater public trust in the Assemblies' may be an ability to accommodate key values that are otherwise in conflict: majoritarian democratic legitimacy, on the one hand, and fair and well-informed (or 'deliberatively rational') decision-making, on the other. Previously, almost no other poll had asked exactly how much Australians trust in constitutional change. However, by resolving trust into a set of discrete public values, the polling and analysis in this work provide evidence that constitutional reform might only succeed when it expresses, at once, the values of both majoritarian and deliberative democracy

Rights and Deliberative Systems

This article maps a significant area of contribution to (and control of) deliberative democratic systems: human rights enacted in law. Thus it takes up John Dryzek’s call for ‘close study of actual deliberative systems in the terms that theorists specify’. The article shows how the theory and practice of legal rights often provide a good fit with, and sometimes help to elaborate and advance, aspects of systemic deliberative democratic theory. One rationale for presenting a more detailed legal map of deliberative systems is descriptive: to look more comprehensively at the set of participants and activities within such systems. Yet the project may also be framed as normative. To try to ensure that legal rights do not displace, but rather align with, systemic deliberative democracy, courts and other legal actors may engage in what the article terms (pace John Hart Ely) ‘deliberative system reinforcement’

Deliberative or Performative? Constitutional Reform and the Politics of Public Engagement in New Zealand

A key assumption that shapes debates over deliberative constitutionalism is the idea that ‘deliberation’ versus the wielding political power based upon partisan influence somehow represent different poles of the constitutional-deliberative coin. This dualism is problematic. While the term ‘deliberation’ means careful consideration and purposeful and dispassionate decision-making, its adjectival form ‘deliberate’ may also imply ‘calculated’, ‘premeditated’ and ‘controlled’. How democracies deliberate is arguably an empirical and political question rather than a theoretical or normative one. This paper sets out to explore these themes in the context of New Zealand, a country that has had three major constitutional deliberations since 2005. Framed by government as ‘national conversations’ on ‘the future of New Zealand’, these include two initiatives aimed at engaging the public’s views on constitutional reform and a recent consultation over proposals to change the national flag. What is striking about these popular constitutional initiatives, however, is the lack of public engagement or serious government interest. We argue that these ‘non-event’ deliberations highlight one of the key challenges for deliberative constitutionalism: how to prevent instrumentalism and performativity from overshadowing the substantive. In developing our argument we draw on anthropological fieldwork on the role of the Crown in New Zealand and the Commonwealth. As we aim to show, the New Zealand case study highlights yet another problem for deliberative constitutionalism in practice: the difficulties of creating a meaningful public consultation when the main terms of reference (‘Crown’ and ‘Constitution’) are so ambiguous, amorphous and poorly understood

Optimistic Erasure Coded Distributed Storage

Erasure coded storage provides a cheap and space efficient way to tolerate failures through the use of networked commodity servers. Erasure coded data is kept on n different servers out of which f can fail. By combining encoded blocks from n-f servers, the data can be read back. This paper presents ORCAS, an Optimistic eRasure Coded Atomic Storage algorithm. ORCAS is the first wait-free, optimally resilient (n > 2f) erasure coded storage for systems with asynchronous processes that can crash and recover. ORCAS is optimistic in the sense that very little space is used for data written during best case periods which are synchronous and failure-free. During asynchronous periods the storage overhead is higher, but atomicity is still guaranteed. We prove worst case as well as best case bounds on the space complexity of erasure coded storage algorithms. We show that ORCAS matches the asynchronous as well as the synchronous and failure-free bounds. Indirectly, we show that tolerating asynchronous periods does not increase storage overhead during synchronous periods

Buying Products from Whom You Know: Personal Connections and Information Asymmetry in Supply Chain Relationships

This study investigates the role personal connections play in a crucial element of the supply chain—supplier selection. We find that the likelihood that a potential supplier (hereafter, a vendor) is selected to be an actual supplier (hereafter, supplier) increases when personal connections between executives of the vendor and the customer exist. The magnitude of the effect varies predictably across management ranks and positions and is stronger when information asymmetries between a vendor and a customer are high. Conditioning on the existence of a supply-chain partnership, a departure of a personally connected executive prompts the termination of the supply-chain relationship more often than a departure of an unconnected executive. Additional analyses show personal connections are associated with less restrictive procurement contracts and with improved customer performance after the formation of a supply-chain relationship. Overall, our study highlights the role of personal connections in reducing information asymmetry and improving operating efficiency in the supply chain