Institutions protecting constitutional democracy: Some conceptual and methodological preliminaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chapter 9 of the South African Constitution refers to ‘institutions protecting constitutional democracy’ (IPDs). Contemporary constitution designers have written into new constitutions numerous such institutions, and scholars have begun to identify them as a fourth branch of government alongside the traditional legislative, executive, and judicial branches. This article explores some of the conceptual issues associated with the new fourth branch: what justifies the creation of these IPDs (the short answer: a particular type of conflict of interest); what are their generic characteristics (the short answer: they are reasonably permanent institutions rather than ad hoc or statutory ones, unlike their antecedents); what is their relation to a constitutional court – another twentieth-century innovation; and why should they be understood to be a ‘branch’ of government rather than a congeries of useful innovations (the short answer: like the traditional branches, they perform distinctive function not readily performed by institutions located within those branches)?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".