The Constitutional Implications of Democracy in Governing Complex Societies

This article examines the constitutional interactions between transition governance and leadership in shaping innovative designs for complex societies. When assessing institutional innovation, state constitutions reveal a great deal of variation: democratic designs take extremely differentiated forms according to different constitutional contexts. This is why this article focuses on the theoretical conceptions of democracy, as they are contextualised in different constitutional designs. It begins with three quotations (from the Holy Bible, the European Union’s admission criteria, a report by the World Bank) that provide us with paradigms for institutional innovation and governance in times of transition, while also shedding light on the concepts of ‘democracy’, ‘leadership’, and ‘transition’. To this extent, the essay examines alternative types of democracy (deliberative, conversational, representative, economic) in order to fill in the gaps within liberal democratic designs. Among them, economic democracy profoundly affects constitutional designs. This means that, in a globalised economic world, constitutional contexts act as mere recipients of changes promoted by the dominance of international actors that have neither democratic nor popular legitimacy