Democratic Decision Making as the First Principle of Contemporary Constitutionalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most scholars treat “constitutionalism” as though it were entirely defined by conceptions of negative liberty. In their view, constitutionalism is about limits on government in the interest of human rights and constitutional order. Gordon Schochet's introduction to the 1979 Nomos volume on the subject is representative: The fundamental premises of constitutionalism are “limited government and the rule of law (that governments exist only to serve specified ends and properly function only according to specified rules)”; or again, “the hallmark of modern constitutionalism is its reliance upon formal limitations on political power that are directly tied to popular sovereignty.” Few political theorists today, few constitutional lawyers, would dissent from this definition. It shapes how we conceive of the domain of constitutional law, the internal values of that law, and the relationships between the various components of the state. Constitutional law is about constraining the state. But constitutions are not primarily about limiting government. Their first role is to constitute government: to specify the processes by which public decisions are made. Any sensible approach to constitutionalism has to take seriously their role in defining the public voice – indeed in creating several complementary or competing public voices, for especially in a federal system, but also in nominally unitary systems, those institutional voices are plural. This is a positive role, a role that enables public action, not one that is adequately captured through the concept of limits. And in defining the public voice, democratic participation is fundamental.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".