Tunisia, where the Arab Spring uprising started, became the only country in the Middle East and North Africa to transition to democracy. This chapter explains why Tunisia’s pathway to democratization was successful by focusing on its constitutional reform process. First, the chapter shows that in order for new constitutions to facilitate democratic transitions, both participation and inclusion in the process are necessary. Using empirical evidence from a statistical content analysis of the public input and constitutional drafts, as well as interviews from Tunisia, Chapter 3 shows the inclusive and participatory process significantly improved the democratic quality of the Tunisian Constitution, yielding a successful transition to democracy. Next, this chapter explains the role of civil society in facilitating the constitutional consensus and the broader transition. Civil society organizations in Tunisia could play this decisive role by fulfilling three core functions. First, they acted as a third-party arbiter of constitutional and political disputes among different groups. Second, different civil society organizations acted as watchdogs, ensuring the integrity and transparency of the process. Third, they created a public sphere for constitutional debates by offering an inclusive venue for citizens to engage in the constitution-making process.

Using an original worldwide data on 195 constitutions adopted in 118 countries from 1974 to 2015 as well as an original dataset of all constitutions in the Middle East and North Africa from 1861 to 2020, this chapter studies the impact of the process of drafting constitutions on their democratic content. It suggests that both individual-level participation and group-level inclusion improve the democratic content of constitutions by guaranteeing more rights. Particularly, this chapter builds on participatory and deliberative theories of democracy, first to conceptualize and operationalize democratic processes and democratic constitutions, and second to emphasizes the importance of constitution-making processes for democracy. Differentiating between individual-level participation and group-level inclusion as two democratic, albeit distinct, forms of democratic processes, this chapter offers robust statistical evidence that greater inclusion and participation are associated with an increased number of democratic provisions in constitutions, specifically de jure constitutional rights, indicating that broad participatory and inclusive processes can improve the democratic content of constitutions.