Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental SystemsThe Project: From Elite Bargains to Citizen Consent
For three decades, constitutional reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been shaped by a familiar logic. Political elites negotiate institutional arrangements under international supervision, often in moments of crisis, with the primary aim of preserving stability. These elite bargains have succeeded in preventing a return to large-scale violence. Yet they have repeatedly failed to generate broad democratic legitimacy or durable political trust.
The Dayton Constitution exemplifies this dilemma. Drafted under wartime urgency by diplomats and political leaders, it was never subjected to public deliberation or democratic ratification. Since then, reform efforts have largely reproduced the same model: externally mediated negotiations among party leaders, conducted with little systematic knowledge of what citizens themselves consider fair, legitimate, or workable. The result is a constitutional order that remains procedurally intact but socially hollow – an agreement among elites rather than a settlement grounded in popular consent.
CONSENT BiH begins from a different premise. Instead of asking what institutional models political leaders or international actors might accept, the project asks a prior and more fundamental question: what kind of state would Bosnia and Herzegovina’s citizens consent to today?
This question is not merely methodological. It is normative. It reflects a shift from the Dayton-era emphasis on “constituent peoples” toward the idea of a constituent will: constitutionalism understood as a democratic practice rooted in collective reasoning about how citizens wish to live together. Thirty years after the war, and in a society where more than half the population has no lived memory of it, the absence of citizen consent has become one of the central constraints on democratic governance.
Why This Project, Why Now?
Bosnia and Herzegovina in the mid-2020s is not the Bosnia and Herzegovina of 1995. The country’s median age is in the mid-forties; a majority of its citizens were children – or not yet born – when the peace agreement was signed. They bear no responsibility for the war, yet continue to live within institutional arrangements designed for its immediate aftermath.
At the same time, the political system remains structured around wartime fears: mutual vetoes, fragmented authority, and deeply entrenched distrust. Constitutional debate is largely monopolised by elites, while citizens are relegated to passive spectators. This generational and political disjunction lies at the heart of CONSENT BiH.
The project responds to a moment in which Bosnia and Herzegovina’s institutions appear frozen in the past, while its society is increasingly shaped by citizens whose political imagination may extend beyond the constraints of Dayton. Rather than offering another externally imposed blueprint, CONSENT BiH seeks to establish an empirical foundation for constitutional dialogue – one grounded in what citizens across communities actually think, prefer, and are willing to accept.
Research Design: Listening, Measuring, Testing
To answer these questions, CONSENT BiH combines qualitative, quantitative, and experimental methods in a three-stage research design. The guiding principle is simple: listen before measuring, and test what has been learned.
The project begins by analysing how citizens themselves talk about constitutional issues. Preliminary individual interviews are used to refine language, identify sensitive themes, and distinguish between rehearsed political slogans and reflective reasoning.
These interviews are followed by six structured focus groups, each composed of six to eight participants. Three groups are mono-ethnic – Bosniak, Serb, and Croat – allowing participants to articulate views within familiar reference frames. One group brings together citizens who identify as “Others,” a category often marginalised in constitutional debate. Two additional groups are explicitly multi-ethnic, enabling comparison between discourse in homogeneous and mixed settings.
This design makes it possible to examine how context shapes constitutional imagination: whether preferences shift in the presence of co-ethnics or across community lines, which issues trigger defensiveness, and where latent overlaps emerge. A final expert focus group, convened in Luxembourg in a neutral setting, brings together constitutional scholars and social scientists from across Bosnia and Herzegovina’s communities. Its role is interpretive rather than directive – helping translate citizens’ language into analytically robust categories.
The output of this stage is both conceptual and linguistic: a grounded vocabulary and thematic structure that anchors the next phase of research.
Building directly on the insights from the focus groups, the second stage consists of a nationwide representative survey of approximately 2,000 respondents. The sample is carefully stratified by entity, ethnicity, gender, age, and education, ensuring comprehensive societal coverage.
The survey systematically measures how citizens evaluate core constitutional questions: political representation, territorial organisation, veto powers, executive design, institutional trust, and issues commonly addressed in democratic constitutions but absent from Dayton. By mapping both divisions and overlaps across communities, this stage provides the project’s empirical backbone – replacing speculation with credible evidence about what citizens actually want from their state.
The final stage moves from measurement to testing. Using conjoint experiments embedded in a further nationally representative survey, respondents are asked to choose between alternative constitutional packages composed of randomly varied institutional features.
This method forces respondents to confront trade-offs, mirroring the logic of real constitutional negotiations. It allows researchers to estimate the relative importance of different institutional elements and to identify combinations most likely to attract broad, cross-community support. The outcome is a data-driven map of constitutional feasibility: not an idealised blueprint, but a realistic picture of where compromise may be possible.
Timeline and Outputs
CONSENT BiH is scheduled to complete all three research stages by mid-2026. Focus groups and interviews will be conducted in early 2026, followed by the national survey in spring and the conjoint experiments by early summer. The remainder of the year will be dedicated to public engagement, policy briefs, media outreach, and academic publications.
The project’s ultimate objective is not to prescribe a single constitutional solution. Rather, it seeks to enrich public debate by grounding constitutional imagination in evidence – transforming citizen preferences into knowledge, and knowledge into a more informed democratic dialogue.