Legislative Consultation:a New Path To The Constitutional Government

As early as 2000, some local governments and People's Congresses have set out to seek the institutional forms of legislative consultation. However, they have failed and accumulated a lot of misconceptions in practice. Starting from about 2014, some scholars entered into thinking about what should legislative consultation be. But most of them confused the “in fact” with the “in should”, on the contrary, deepened the misconceptions stemmed from the practice. The paper just wants to sweep away these outstanding abuses, and delineates legislative consultation clearly.The paper consists of three parts:In the first part, we just wanna discuss and make it clear what should legislative consultation be in theory. Legislative consultation which grew out of Deliberative Democracy is a new form of democratic legislation, differing from the political consultation, legislative hearings and other concepts. The participants consist of all interest groups and intellectual groups. In summary, the legislative consultation is a process,in which each of the interest representatives and knowledge experts independently puts forward their opinions and suggestions about the key legislative controversial issues, undering the host of the legislature. And then, the legislature,in accordance with the principles of equal participation, respecting for differences, gathering rational knowledge and balancing the conflicts among interest groups, exclusively turn all the opinions and suggestions into legal rules.Legislative consultation attempts to promote the consensus through a consultation mechanism, then increase the democracy and legitimacy of legislation. However, legislative consultation should smash through two sets of barriers. The first one is a dilemma: unattainability to direct participation, and dishonesty to representative; The other one is social cell and stratification, which cause polarization or multipolar of consultation,Eventually, it is difficult to make interest groups balanced. In addition, there are some false steps in the practice, such as having a narrow range of participants, with the center of the CPPCC. The valid method to break these challenges is: to fully absorb the views of all groups into the same furnace, so that “ two negatives make a positive, and two privates make a public too”.In the third part, we try to build up the institutional framework of legislative consultation. “The Conference of Legislative Consultation” is the pillar. At the same time, NPC, as the legislature, itself needs to be innovated to response to the value-pursuit of legislative consultation. In addition, legislative point of contact at the local level can be considered to be a “vacuum cleaner” of legislation information.Legislative consultation trys to enable the exchange of information among different interest groups or individuals through an institutionalized consultation platform, complete the conversion of preferences and coordination of conflicted interests, achieve the the maximum consensus, ultimately, arrive at “the rule of Constitution”. The paper argues that legislative consultation which be based on the dual-legislation system of the NPC and the Administration may be the viable path to achieve the democratization of legislation for China.