IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_5056.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Constitution on Ice

Author

Listed:
  • Thorvaldur Gylfason

Abstract

This paper reports recent events in Iceland where the political agents of oligarchs didn‘t even bother to try to influence, let alone contest, a national referendum on a new constitution because, if they didn‘t like the result, they would simply find ways to nullify the outcome ex post. The paper reviews and explains the making of Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution bill from 2009 to 2014, and also offers an explanation as to why the bill failed to be passed by Parliament, addressing various criticisms leveled against the bill along the way. It needs to be emphasized that these criticisms, whether well founded or not (and they are not), are irrelevant because Parliament held a national referendum on 20 October 2012 in which the bill and its key individual provisions were accepted by an overwhelming majority of the voters. A democratic nation cannot under any circumstances permit the outcome of national elections, let alone a constitutional referendum, to be fixed ex post, but this is what the Icelandic Parliament is at present trying to do, flirting with a farewell to democracy.

Suggested Citation

  • Thorvaldur Gylfason, 2014. "Constitution on Ice," CESifo Working Paper Series 5056, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5056
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5056.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gudrun Johnsen, 2014. "Bringing Down the Banking System," Palgrave Macmillan Books, Palgrave Macmillan, number 978-1-137-34735-0, October.
    2. Thorvaldur Gylfason, 2014. "Iceland: How Could This Happen?," CESifo Working Paper Series 4605, CESifo.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ling-Ling Li & Shi-Yu Wen & Ming-Lang Tseng & Anthony S. F. Chiu, 2020. "Photovoltaic array prediction on short-term output power method in Centralized power generation system," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 290(1), pages 243-263, July.
    2. Thorvaldur Gylfason & Per Magnus Wijkman, 2015. "Double Diversification with an Application to Iceland," CESifo Working Paper Series 5386, CESifo.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Thorvaldur Gylfason & Gylfi Zoega, 2014. "The Dutch Disease in Reverse: Iceland’s Natural Experiment," OxCarre Working Papers 138, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford.
    2. Marcus Miller, 2021. "Choosing the Narrative: the Shadow Banking Crisis in Light of Covid," Open Economies Review, Springer, vol. 32(2), pages 291-310, April.
    3. Már Gudmundsson, 2017. "Global Financial Integration And Central Bank Policies In Small, Open Economies," The Singapore Economic Review (SER), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 62(01), pages 135-146, March.
    4. Gylfi Zoega, 2016. "Responding to Capital Flows in a Very Small Economy," Atlantic Economic Journal, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 44(2), pages 159-170, June.
    5. Gylfi Zoega, 2019. "Greece and the Western Financial Crisis," Atlantic Economic Journal, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 47(2), pages 113-126, June.
    6. Sigríður Benediktsdóttir & Gauti Bergþóruson Eggertsson & Eggert Þórarinsson, 2017. "The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Iceland: A Postmortem Analysis of the 2008 Financial Crisis," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 48(2 (Fall)), pages 191-308.
    7. Hamid Raza & Bjorn Gudmundsson & Gylfi Zoega & Stephen Kinsella, 2016. "Two thorns of experience: financialisation in Iceland and Ireland," International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(6), pages 771-789, November.
    8. Guðmundsson, Björn Rúnar, 2015. "Financialisation and financial crisis in Iceland," IPE Working Papers 55/2015, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Institute for International Political Economy (IPE).
    9. Thorvaldur Gylfason & Gylfi Zoega, 2017. "The Dutch Disease in Reverse: Iceland's Natural Experiment," CESifo Working Paper Series 6513, CESifo.
    10. Thorhildur Ólafsdóttir & Tinna Ásgeirsdóttir, 2015. "Gender differences in drinking behavior during an economic collapse: evidence from Iceland," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 13(4), pages 975-1001, December.
    11. Stefán Ólafsson, 2017. "From Political Advocacy to 'Alternative Facts': A Comment on Hannes Gissurarson's Method," Econ Journal Watch, Econ Journal Watch, vol. 14(3), pages 399–429-3, September.
    12. Mr. Marc C Dobler & Mr. Simon T Gray & Diarmuid Murphy & Bozena Radzewicz-Bak, 2016. "The Lender of Last Resort Function after the Global Financial Crisis," IMF Working Papers 2016/010, International Monetary Fund.
    13. Thorvaldur Gylfason, 2015. "Social Capital and Crises with an Application to Iceland," CESifo Working Paper Series 5423, CESifo.
    14. Sheila Dow & Guðrún Johnsen & Alberto Montagnoli, 2015. "A critique of full reserve banking," Working Papers 2015008, The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics.
    15. Sigríður Benediktsdóttir & Gauti B. Eggertsson & Eggert Þórarinsson, 2017. "The Rise, the Fall, and the Resurrection of Iceland," NBER Working Papers 24005, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Tinna Laufey Asgeirsdottir & Asgerður Th. Bjornsdottir & Thorhildur Ólafsdóttir, 2017. "Drinking behavior during the Icelandic economic boom, crisis, and recovery," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 15(4), pages 1191-1213, December.
    17. Karlsson Johannes & Matthiasson Thorolfur, 2015. "Tax Evasion, Tax Avoidance and The Influence of Special Interest Groups: Taxation in Iceland from 1930 to the Present," Nordic Tax Journal, Sciendo, vol. 2015(2), pages 1-17, December.
    18. Hamid Raza & Gylfi Zoega & Stephen Kinsella, 2015. "Capital controls, financial crisis and the investment saving nexus:Evidence from Iceland," Working Papers 201518, Geary Institute, University College Dublin.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    constitution; democracy; Iceland;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • K10 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - General (Constitutional Law)

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5056. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.