Designing the Democracy-Defending Citizen

Concerns regarding threats to the endurance of liberal democracy worldwide have spurred a renewed focus on constitutional design, regarding both the identification of weaknesses and the potential for design innovation to enhance democratic resilience. To date, this debate has focused more squarely on identifying key mechanisms from existing constitutions, reforming existing constitutional organs (e.g., courts), or bringing extraconstitutional institutions within the constitutional realm (e.g., political parties), all couched within a meta-debate about whether constitutional design overall actually makes any difference to democratic resilience. Citizens have been somehow both central and peripheral to these discussions. Often reduced to tropes, they are viewed by turns as rebels against liberal democracy, victims of neo-authoritarian forces and trends reshaping democratic governance, cyphers for the imaginaries of both democrats and populists, and saviors—the ultimate bulwark when all other defenses have failed. This article seeks to help us better see the people in this debate through focus on three key dimensions of constitutional design: constitutional rights of resistance against unjust rule or threats to democracy; the question of constitutionalising civic education; and the spread of citizens’ assemblies, which have not been enshrined as constitutional mechanisms but which warrant analysis from a constitutional design standpoint. In doing so, it is argued that we face stark limitations in designing the democracy-defending citizen through constitutional law but that a greater focus on the people is vital in the developing constitutional design debates.