Constitutional change referendums: the democratic cost of failure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Integrating perspectives from jurisprudence and political theory, this paper presents constitutional change referendums as a form of legislation in which two collective actors must agree on legal change: the representatives who formulate an amendment proposal and the voters who decide whether to approve or reject that proposal. Referendum failure occurs where there are alternative constitutional arrangements dealing with the same subject matter in respect of which the proposers and voters could form congruent intentions, but that alternative is not realised. This outcome is normatively problematic because constitutions are already more difficult to change than ordinary law; if plausible changes that would appear to meet the constitution’s thresholds cannot be made, the democratic deficit of constitutionalism increases. In this respect, our normative argument assumes the value of – limited – constitutional flexibility. Applying this framework to the recently rejected referendums in Ireland, Australia, Chile and Taiwan, we argue that the first three represent referendum failure. In each case, it is at least plausible that there was an alternative constitutional arrangement to which both proposers and voters could have agreed. But the situation in Taiwan is more significant than referendum failure. In Taiwan, no amendment proposal can plausibly meet the amendment thresholds, a problem that is tantamount to constitutional failure.
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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 | 0.042 | 0.102 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".