Abstract
Constitution-making is cast as a state-society dialogue, with public consultation sustaining the legal fiction that “the people” write the social contract. I introduce will-confirmation—the interpretive practice whereby elites utilize underdetermined public input to legitimate representative claims. It has two modes: constructive (synthesizing ambiguous input into alignment) and dismissive (excluding contrary input as unrepresentative). Across thirty-seven interviews from Chile’s Constitutional Convention and Cuba’s Drafting Commission, I show how will-confirmation operates amid crises of representation. In Chile, drafters claiming to embody the people produced parallel monologues, aggravating rather than resolving a lack of elite consensus. In Cuba, drafters and regime-loyal intermediaries filtered input into centralized coherence, obscuring rather than remedying the absence of ideological pluralism. Will-confirmation reduced consultation to self-legitimation rather than a check on interpretation.