Reaction of Mark N. Franklin to Andrew Moravcsik’s article on the collapse of the Constitutional treaty

Andrew Moravcik’s article, “What Can We Learn from the Collapse of the European Constitutional Project?”seems to me to hit the nail on the head in terms of the expectations that empirical political scientists would have had for the behavior of citizens faced with a quasiconstitutional debate. His argument could have been strengthened by referring to survey evidence (for example Schmitt and Thomassen 1999; Gabel 1998; van der Eijk and Franklin 1996). The critical point that survey evidence adds to Moravcik’s argument is that voters are not fools. They can apparently identify a real debate on a topic that is going to affect their lives in important ways. And they behave as though they know a fake debate when they see one. As Moravcik points out, Europe already has a constitution in all but name, and the proposed replacement would not have affected voters’ lives in any important respect. Had it been otherwise (and had they been supplied with sufficient cues to this effect) they would have become aware of this and taken the trouble to inform themselves sufficiently to weigh in on the decision. As things stood, they were faced with a nondecision and most of them reacted quite rationally by failing to take any interest in it – thus leaving the debate to the extremists on both sides, as Moravcik also points out.

The only question I would raise regarding Moravcik’s argument is whether attempts to engage public attention and engender a public debate regarding the proposed constitution were any more than window-dressing – no different from many other attempts by policy-makers to appear open and transparent. Earlier exercises in elaborating the Treaty of Rome had been criticized for failing even to attempt to engage public attention and debate. Arguably, the publicity given to the drafting of a European constitution was no more than a response to such criticism.