Deliberative constitutionalism in non-state contexts: Deliberation to, from and through constitutional reform

Abstract This article examines the relevance of ‘deliberative’ constitutionalism – the idea that democratic deliberation ought to inform our expectations of constitutional law and processes – to constitutional moments in non-state contexts. More specifically, it explores the ways in which extending a deliberative constitutional lens to non-state spaces can both enrich our understanding of the legal-political dynamics within these spaces and, in turn, inform the field of deliberative constitutionalism itself. To do this, it takes an empirical approach to interpret and analyse a constitutional process through which a university student union reinvented its own democratic structures, in significant part through a ‘deliberative mini-public’ of everyday members. Drawing on interviews, observations and records, it demonstrates that a deliberative constitutional lens maps onto and usefully interprets the democratic process in this context while also offering empirical insight into an underexplored dimension of deliberative constitutionalism: that is, connections between deliberative approaches ‘to’ constitutional reform and the resulting constitutional features ‘from’ which subsequent political deliberation flows. It shows how the former carries ‘through’ into the latter by way of the internalization of deliberative norms resulting from both direct and indirect experience with deliberative approaches.