Ideology and the Politics of Constitution Making: The Institutional Organization of the European Convention

This study investigates the politics of constitution making through an analysis of the institutional organization of the European Union (EU) constitutional convention. Constitutional conventions resemble parliamentary bodies in terms of their institutional arrangements, and need to be studied with the same sensitivity that has been given to the study of legislatures. This study focuses on the role of committees in the EU Convention and their impact on the drafting process. Using new data on delegate positions in the Convention, I test two competing committee composition hypotheses, the outlier and representative committee hypothesis, with a Monte Carlo simulation technique. The four main results of this study are (1) that the political leadership of the European convention controlled to a large extent its institutional organization, (2) that committees were influential in the drafting process, (3) that there is stronger evidence for committee outliers than for representative committees, and (4) that the outlying committees were slanted to the left