| Abstrakt: |
Iceland experienced a hard financial crisis, but could employ a rather successful crisis management. The country, however, generated international admiration because of the deliberative constitutional reform attempt, which finally shipwrecked because of the dynamics of party competition. This paper argues that nepotistic tendencies of the Icelandic democracy are not captured by empirical measurements of the quality of democracies. These nepotistic defects partially urged the severeness of the financial crisis in Iceland. The Icelandic form of democracy complicated the deliberative process of a constitutional revision. In the end, the constitutional revision was blocked by party competition in a divided society lacking consensual institutions of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
