Democracy

Democracy (in this corpus) means democratic bind at the commitment boundary: equal-weight collective aggregation — each qualified participant one vote; threshold (majority, supermajority, unanimity) pre-committed before votes are seen.

Introduction: When Social Stability Matters More Than Quality.

Collective decision-making is not, in general, about better decisions. It is about decisions more widely accepted.

What democratic bind does

• Aggregates legitimacy — acceptance, standing, shared cost-bearing
• Produces outcomes more parties treat as theirs — reducing sabotage, exit, violent reopening
• Records dissent on record — visibility of trade-offs

What it does not do

• Discover the best answer under D-F logic — see vote on physics
• Substitute for blind review, stress testing, or experiment architecture where quality is paramount (art. 20)
• Resolve empirically settled questions — outcomes foreseeable with high probability on a long-term horizon when the chain is published (sustainable systems over short-termism as default virtue)
• Improve calibration — that is meritocracy, not democracy

vs meritocracy

For a given bind, democratic (equal weight) and meritocratic (calibration-weighted) aggregation are mutually exclusive. Democracy answers who must be heard; meritocracy answers whose measured judgment should count more — transparently?

Record requirements

The L0 event records: voter identities, pre-committed threshold, individual votes, outcome, dissent. Post-hoc threshold adjustment is theatre — compliance theatre, not democracy.

When proportionate

Signals from art. 35: many parties severely affected under genuine uncertainty; cost allocation contested after evidence; implementation needs voluntary compliance; social peace priced above marginal epistemic gain. Anti-signals: false uncertainty; quality-primary binds — D-F derivation, empirical knowledge with traceable evidence and derivation, or outcomes foreseeable with high probability on a long horizon (sustainable systems over short-termism as the default virtue); vote on physics.

Corpus stance

A2 — working context: Not a theory of the state; a named bind pattern for organisational and platform governance at the commitment boundary.