The Conclusion draws together the key themes explored in this book. Highlighting the crux norms of comity, collaboration, and conflict management framed by the conditions of reciprocity, reputation, and repeat play, the Conclusion defends a relational and collaborative conception of the separation of powers. Looking to new horizons, the Conclusion gestures at future lines of research opened up by the collaborative idea, including the possibility of imagining international, supra-national, and transnational law in collaborative terms. It concludes by presenting the fundamental norms of the collaborative constitution as vital in the current moment, but also as a form of ’constitutional capital’. On analogy with the influential idea of ’social capital’, it argues that the unwritten norms of the collaborative constitutional system are a precious constitutional resource we should preserve, protect, and enhance in order to create stable and sustainable constitutionalism for the twenty-first century.

One motivation for this volume is to question the way that academic models of the political process depict preference aggregation and public policy formation. More significantly, this analysis has implications for democratic political institutions. There is an illusion, promoted by the political elite, that democratic oversight of government can control its power and direct it toward the public interest, but the powerless cannot control the powerful, even if the powerless far outnumber the powerful. The ability of constitutional constraints to limit government power and direct it toward the interests of the masses is also questionable, because those constraints must be enforced. If public policy is designed and implemented by the political elite, ultimately the power of government can be controlled only by a system of checks and balances that enables some of the elite to control the power of others. Democratic institutions can play a role in determining who holds political power, and constitutional constraints can play a role if there are institutional mechanisms to enforce them, but without a system of checks and balances that enables some elites to control the power of others, democracy and constitutional constraints are ineffective.