ABSTRACT
Voigt's paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, Voigt criticizes discourse ethics (DE) and constitutional economics (CE) for their disregard of (or at least their disinterest in) making their analyses suitable for empirical applications, and analyzes the reasons for this disregard. In the second part, Voigt concentrates on two aspects of popular participation in constitutional choice: first, on participation's effects on content, legitimacy, and success of a constitution; second, on the preconditions under which popular participation takes place. Not interested in the normative venture, as DE and CE 'are conventionally perceived' (p. 200), Voigt blends his 'conjecture that discourse matters for the choice and development of constitutional rules' (abstract) into testable hypotheses. These hypotheses are interesting, but many of them remain unrelated to the first, critical part of the paper. The paper also refers to the positive-normative distinction. While positive constitutional economics (PCE) has its origin in real deficiencies concerning empirical interpretations of concepts or in the lack of empirical applications of both discourse ethics and constitutional economics, this reference is unnecessary in order to handle the issues Voigt has presented.
