Examples of legal language for describing or requiring deliberative processes.
The table below collects examples of deliberative or participatory democratic processes that have been institutionalised in legal text. For each, we record the country, current operational status, the nature of the institutionalisation, and excerpts of the relevant legal language — both the clauses that design the process and the clauses that give it binding force.
Disclaimer about AI use.
About this resource
The data
How to contribute
…
Acknowledgements
PLACEHOLDER — thanks to those who contributed to or reviewed this work.
In academic contexts, please cite this work using a citation similar to the following.
Smith, Oliver, Kyle Redman, Flynn Devine, Eloïse Gabadou, and Luke Thorburn. 2026. "Deliberation clauses in legal text." AI & Democracy Foundation. https://ai-democracy.org/deliberation-in-legal-text/
Here is the BibTeX entry.
@article{deliberation-in-legal-text2026,
author = {Oliver Smith and Kyle Redman and Flynn Devine and Eloïse Gabadou and Luke Thorburn},
title = {Deliberation clauses in legal text},
journal = {AI \& Democracy Foundation},
year = {2026},
url = {https://ai-democracy.org/deliberation-in-legal-text/}
}
