The Deeper Inquiry

The constitutional theory literature on self-amendment — how constitutions can change themselves without the change process becoming a mechanism for constitutional capture — is extensive and directly relevant. The work of Richard Albert, particularly Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions (2019), provides a comparative analysis of how different constitutional systems have designed amendment processes and what the consequences of different designs have been. Albert's analysis of 'constitutional dismemberment' — the use of formally valid amendment procedures to fundamentally alter constitutional character — is particularly relevant to Providence's design of amendment protection for the core constitutional principles.

The deliberative democracy literature on constitutional design, including Jon Elster's work on constitutional assemblies, Hélène Landemore's work on democratic reason, and James Fishkin's work on deliberative polling, addresses the specific question of what deliberative processes can be relied upon to produce constitutional decisions that genuinely reflect broad participant values rather than the preferences of the most organized or most vocal minority. Fishkin's empirical work on deliberative polling in particular provides evidence that properly designed deliberative processes produce different and more considered outcomes than conventional aggregation of existing preferences.