Iceland Crowdsourced a Constitution. Then Parliament Ignored It.

After Iceland's banking sector collapsed in 2008, public trust in the political class evaporated. The 2010 "pots and pans revolution" produced a coalition government that promised, among other things, to rewrite the 1944 constitution from scratch — and to do it in public.

The process was unusual. Parliament called a National Forum in November 2010: 950 randomly selected Icelanders gathered for a day to identify the values the new constitution should reflect. The Supreme Court invalidated the next step, an election for a constitutional assembly, on procedural grounds, so parliament simply appointed the same 25 winners as the Stjórnlagaráð (Constitutional Council). Through 2011 the council met in Reykjavik, posted draft articles on its website weekly, and took written comments through Facebook and email. By July 2011 it had a complete draft.

A non-binding national referendum in October 2012 asked voters whether the draft should be the basis of a new constitution. About 49% of eligible voters turned out and 67% of them said yes. Parliament now had the legitimacy and the time to pass the bill.

It didn't. The opposition filibustered, the spring 2013 election came before the Althingi could finish, and the new center-right coalition that took power had no interest in the project. The draft has sat in parliamentary limbo since. The crowdsourcing mostly worked: thousands of suggestions were processed, the council operated transparently, the document was readable. What failed was the next step. A constitution still needs the same legislative supermajority the existing system requires, and a public-facing process can't substitute for the votes when those votes don't exist.