Political Functions and Limitations of Contemporary State Constitutions in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
State constitutions in the United States serve various important political functions that may be relevant and helpful to constitutional designers in other political systems. This paper explores two striking features of contemporary state constitutionalism with an eye towards their value for those considering a written Quebec constitution. First, state constitutionalism is characterized by frequent formal amendment through popular political processes. This has resulted in a form of constitutionalism that often prioritizes swift democratic responsiveness over entrenched prior commitments. Because recent empirical scholarship suggests that this is a broader phenomenon often occurring in federal countries with written subnational constitutions, Quebec reformers should be mindful of how formal amendment under a written constitution can energize popular constitutional politics. Second, state constitutions have not been particularly effective in protecting state political identities or community. In fact, because of frequent amendment and the strong pull of national political parties, the dominant trend in state constitutionalism is convergence on national issues and identities. This should raise questions for Quebecois nationalists regarding the real, long-term value of a written provincial constitution.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".