Chapters 4 and 5 described respectively the underlying norms of a political constitutionalism and the most appropriate forms for it to take. In each case, I suggested that the norms and related forms are best met through procedures similar to those associated with democracy. This chapter takes this suggestion further and argues that actually existing democracies prove both constitutional and constitutive through embodying the republican principles of non-domination and political equality, on the one hand, and political mechanisms that ensure suitable kinds of public reasoning and the balance of power, on the other.

I noted in the opening section of chapter 3 how legal constitutionalists have tended to advocate apolitical models of deliberative democracy. Indeed, there has been a propensity among normative theorists more generally to dismiss the democratic systems that actually govern us as at best devoid of normative value, and at worst positively perilous to the norms most democrats espouse. Hence the desire to constitutionalise these norms and to advocate deliberative conceptions of democracy that reflect highly idealised conceptions of judicial reasoning. However, a running theme of this book has been the unavoidability of the political dimension of legal and constitutional decision-making. By contrast to much contemporary political theory, therefore, I want to explore and extol the normative qualities of real democracy. Indeed, the very aspects many legal and political theorists are apt to denigrate – its adversarial and competitive qualities, its use of compromise and majority rule to generate agreement, the role of political parties – are those I seek to praise.