Book Symposium: Leah Trueblood, Referendums as Representative Democracy (Hart Publishing 2024)

This book review revisits the notion of a fundamental constitutional question and its constitutive nature in relation to the material constitution, a theme that features prominently in Leah Trueblood’s Referendums as Representative Democracy. In critically engaging with the book’s challenge to two-track democracy, the review foregrounds the significance of the material constitution, understood as political and social conditions that shape formal constitutional arrangements. It argues that if, as Trueblood suggests, the material constitution underpins the formal constitutional arrangements, then this necessarily entails a commitment to the distinction between constituent and constituted power. Only by adopting this conceptual distinction can we fully grasp how referendums on fundamental constitutional questions can activate the constituent power of the people.