THE EMPTY SET. Screening a Constitutional Text Against Its Own Provisions Across 150 Sovereign States
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: HIGHLIGHTS ▸ A constitution can be screened against itself. Any constitutional text that specifies its own ratification threshold, its own relation to supranational authority, and its own unamendable provisions has thereby specified the conditions a state must already satisfy in order to receive it. Those conditions can be extracted from the text and applied to the world. No external theory of constitutional design is required, and none is used here. ▸ Applied to 150 sovereign states, the screen returns nothing. Not one state can lawfully adopt the Constitution of the Virtuous Democracy as written. The maximum attained is five of six conditions, by three states. This is reported as the result rather than treated as a failure of the procedure. ▸ The result is not an artefact of the procedure. It survives the deletion of four of the six conditions individually, the deletion of most pairs, one thousand random perturbations of every cost parameter, and five hundred perturbations of every ordinal coding band. The obstacle is located in the document, not in the world and not in the instrument. ▸ Two provisions do almost all the excluding, and neither is well derived. An entrenched individual right to bear arms is survivable in three states out of 150 — two per cent. Entrenched sub-national competences exist in nineteen per cent. Both are protected as eternity clauses; both have thinner derivations from the underlying framework than the provisions they sit beside. ▸ Relaxing three clauses is worth twenty-seven countries. Moving the arms clause, the entrenchment of decentralisation, and the maximal reading of the sovereignty clause into a national-variant layer converts eligibility from zero states to twenty-seven — eighteen per cent of the world. The design trade-off is now a number rather than a preference. ▸ Eternity clauses are adoption costs. A provision placed beyond amendment does not merely resist future erosion; it must be satisfied at the moment of founding, by a state that has not yet adopted the text. Entrenchment therefore prices itself twice, and the second price is paid before the constitution exists. This is a general result about constitutional design, not a peculiarity of the text screened here. ▸ Two preregistered predictions were stated in advance and both are confirmed. Fewer than three states pass all conditions; the arms clause is the most binding of the six. The predictions were fixed before the population was coded and the analysis script was locked before it was run. ▸ Judgement is confined to facts that can be checked. Every condition is evaluated from a table of primary institutional attributes — treaty memberships, federal structure, ratification procedure, turnout record. A second coder who reproduces the table necessarily reproduces the result, and disagreement can only arise where a primary source settles it. ABSTRACT Constitutional texts are ordinarily assessed for coherence, justice, or institutional design quality. They are not ordinarily assessed for whether any state on earth could lawfully adopt them. This paper introduces a procedure for that assessment and applies it at population scale. The procedure is self-referential. A constitutional text that specifies its own ratification threshold, its own relation to external jurisdiction, and its own unamendable provisions has thereby specified conditions that a receiving state must already satisfy. Those conditions are extracted from the text and become boolean gates. No criterion is imported from comparative politics; the text supplies its own screen. Applied to the Constitution of the Virtuous Democracy across 150 sovereign states in all regions and all regime bands, the screen returns the empty set. No state satisfies all six conditions; three satisfy five. The result is subjected to four independent robustness tests — leave-one-out and leave-two-out over the conditions, one thousand perturbations of the cost schedule, and five hundred perturbations of the ordinal coding bands — and survives all four. The binding constraints are the ratification route, the turnout quorum, and the entrenched arms provision, which is satisfied by three states in 150. Federalism and supranational integration, the two constraints most likely to be nominated as the cause, do no independent work at the margin. A counterfactual screen prices the remedy: relocating three provisions from the eternity clauses to a national-variant layer converts eligibility from zero states to twenty-seven. The paper draws a general conclusion about constitutional design — that entrenchment is an adoption cost payable at founding, not merely a protection against later erosion — and specifies the instrument that should succeed this one, in which the unit of screening is the individual provision rather than the whole text. Keywords: constitutional design · eternity clauses · unamendability · constitutional adoption · self-referential screening · preregistration · comparative constitutional law · mechanism diffusion Subject classification: Comparative Constitutional Law · Constitutional Theory · Measurement Methodology
Author: Mattos, José Caetano de
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204098181
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