Cardano Constitution to Replace the Interim Constitution

1.0 Introduction§

1.1 Summary§

We are voting YES on this governance action to update the Cardano Constitution.

We describe in this rationale a rigorous approach to evaluating the delegate endorsed Cardano Constitution. In this approach we will:

• Establish a methodical framework for being able to evaluate this constitution not just for ratification and implementation, but to understand across the life of the constitution whether it is achieving success
• Establish a “floor” criteria for minimum viable governance, in practice a hippocratic principle to “do no harm”
• Leverage the framework to interrogate this updated constitution and surface the criteria that indicate whether it deserves to be ratified

1.2 Description of Governance Action§

This Governance Action is of the type “Update to Constitution”, and it is only voted on by DReps and the Constitutional Committee. SPOs do not vote on constitutional updates under the CIP-1694 process, and DRep voting threshold for this type of governance action is set by the (dvt_update_to_constitution) protocol parameter.

This constitutional update has been submitted by the Constitution Ratification Working Group (CRWG) of the Cardano Civics Committee of Intersect, in full compliance with all requirements laid out in the Interim Constitution, including date of submission, Constitutional Convention and global workshop/elected delegation requirements. The governance action describes a fully workshopped document, involving hundreds of contributors, thousands of hours of volunteer commitments, and remarkable human efforts to fully scope, design, iterate and craft a Constitution representing the Cardano Blockchain Ecosystem.

Current status of the Constitutional Committee vote for ratification at the time of submission of this rationale was 1 vote constitutional, 6 votes not yet voted.

2.0 Discussion§

2.1 Method§

2.1.1 Internal versus external - perspective matters
There are two critical challenges when evaluating a constitution. The first of these two main methodological difficulties is the problem of determining what perspective to use, and the second is the difficulty of conceptualizing and analyzing “gaps” between constitutional text and observed practice.
We are addressing the “perspective” challenge in this evaluation by not adhering to either an “internal” (participant-centric) or “external” (observer-centric) perspective, but moving between the two perspectives using a rubric of “usefulness”. The question of how an end user might use or how their understanding might benefit from this voting rationale is foremost in our minds. We think that this mixed approach represented by the meso-level concepts in 2.1.3 and across the rationale as a whole points toward a basic fact about criteria of constitutional performance: rather than reducing to a singular understanding, the success of the Cardano Constitution may be inevitably plural in character.

2.1.2 Before and after comparison - mind the gap
Due to the multiplicity of levels of analysis and purpose at play within any constitutional regime, “baselining” a constitutional landscape, of establishing a clear “before and after” is complicated. The Cardano Constitution submitted for evaluation is multiple in character, being at once transformative, preservative and revolutionary, and not all provisions described across the Tenets, Articles and Guardrails will be amenable to the same strategies of implementation. Time separates some of these provisions (short-term versus long-term), and interactions with the trajectories of already existing institutions or with exogenous shocks (Foundations, markets, CEXs) separates others.
Attempts to measure this gap may well be misleading. To the degree that the constitution simply codifies already existing behavior, the fact that it successfully describes extant economic and political realities does not mean that the constitution itself has done any work or has made any difference. On the other hand, when is it safe to assume that the function of a constitution is transformative as opposed to preservative?
We attempt to address this multiplicity of character by favoring analysis of institutional and process trajectories over snapshots of same. Evaluation over time seems like the appropriate way to truly evaluate the success or failure of this effort, and the rest of this rationale is concerned with establishing the framework from which this DRep will monitor and evaluate not only this specific governance action but the overall process of constitutional development and governance that it occurs within.

2.1.3 Mid-range criteria - the root of the evaluative framework
Four generally applicable mid-range criteria for evaluating successful implementation of a constitution can be summarized briefly: (1) sociological legitimacy in the eyes of the public; (2) the channeling of political conflict into constitutional institutions; (3) the control of the agency costs associated with the institutionalization of Cardano’s government; and (4) the creation of appropriate public goods. It should be stated that this quartet of ambitions is not the only imaginable set of mid-range criteria. To the contrary, different evaluators are likely to come up with different lists. Moreover, these benchmarks are also not exclusive of other potential ambitions, whether external or internal. They provide, in other words, a useful corner of common ground, rather than filling the field. They are laid out below as a reference through which to understand this evaluator’s approach to the specific criteria of the Cardano Constitution discussed in 2.3

**Legitimacy**

We define “Legitimacy” here as : generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate. In regards to the Cardano Constitution this means a shared normative belief held by a substantial number of the public that the constitution warrants respect and fidelity. Without it, in the short term, a popular disaffection for the constitution or its institutions will render initiatives difficult to carry out as a consequence of frictional resistance. Over the long term illegitimate institutions are much more likely to rely on expensive and destabilizing techniques of repression to sustain power.
A key question for evaluation is whether the constitution successfully defines a set of overarching values and identities that can in fact create a sufficiently integrated political community. In the Cardano Constitution, Articles II and V establish Cardano community citizenship (II) and also liquid democracy (V). These two qualities are promising in terms of legitimacy, as they create a very wide space for political differences to coexist with a mechanism that can scale to match the breadth of this diversity, while creating focal points (localization of voting power with specific DReps) for social deliberation over specific differences. This legitimacy is not guaranteed and must be monitored, as the Tenets in Article I alongside the technical implementation (timeliness, representativeness) of liquid democracy may actually lead to decision-making that is divisive in practice, or even contradictory between Tenets.
The second important question of legitimacy, to be asked over time, is to assess the public perception of durable institutions and processes established by the Constitution, i.e. is there a belief among the diffuse public in the legitimacy of durable constitutional institutions (as distinct from temporary officeholders)?

Channelling political conflict
Successful constitutions channel conflict through formal political institutions, as opposed to forcing antagonists to take disagreements to the public square or the maquis.
The three most important areas of political conflict in Cardano will resolve around Treasury withdrawals, hard fork initiation and parameter changes. This Cardano Constitution proposes different mechanisms for channeling and mediating this likely conflict, while the underlying CIP-1694 implementation creates an initial funnel for this conflict by defining these areas of conflict into specific, parameterized governance actions.
For Treasury withdrawals, Article IV establishes an overarching approach to treasury sustainability that delegates to community developed institutions the responsibility for deliberation and mediation of disagreements, via prescribed budgetary requirements. For hardforks and protocol parameter changes, Article II references a comprehensive and technical Guardrails appendix, which includes supporting documentation for the thoughtfulness and deliberation that went into establishing these guardrails. There is also a process in place for iterating the guardrails (the Constitution explicitly references “liveness” for the guardrails appendix and process). This places the mediation and deliberation required to resolve conflict over these issues into automated or automatable scripts, via highly specialized spaces such as technical steering committees where they are designed and tested.
In all three cases the underlying governance action process ultimately resolves these conflicts with democratic processes, with on-chain voting. But it is to the credit of this constitution that it does not merely attempt to install democratic intent, but has fashioned rules for institutionalizing extant conflict without exacerbating it.
A final consideration for the channeling of political conflict, is the overall reduction in the political stakes attached to “losing” a political conflict. While nothing as revolutionary as “Win-win” has been explicitly designed here, the Article I Tenets are an early attempt at specifying the constitutional rights of Cardano citizens that the Preamble promises the Constitution will guard. While not explicitly supported via submitted documentation, it is the understanding of this DRep that these Tenets are meant to be an embarkation for a process of discovering, defining, and enshrining constitutional rights for Cardano citizens. On their face, these tenets would fail a test of enforcing Constitutional competition, but as an early probe into a complex area, they create a clear and relevant connection to the fundamental nature of the community (blockchain based), and are a temperant approach to leavening the differences between stakeholders, which can lower the stakes of governmental turnover.

Limiting agency costs
An expectation of a constitutionally created government and governance institutions is that it will take action on behalf of the citizens rather than for itself or for transient officeholders. The technical term for this is “agency slack” or “agency costs”, but we all understand it broadly as “corruption.” Among the mechanisms in the Cardano Constitution that are intended to address this: officeholder term limits, separation of powers and veto options, and even the requirements within Article IV for smart contracts, independent audits and independent administration of budget items (a form of anti-corruption, i.e. “Can’t do evil.”)
Observed corruption, such as private rents extracted from the public fisc, are an important and obvious metric to track over time, and are an indicator of constitutional failure. Less obvious are instances where lack of turnover in officeholders is observed despite poor performance, or artful circumvention of term limits. It should be noted that petty corruption has proven across all systems to be difficult to mitigate at the constitutional level, and will not be the subject of any deep analysis by this DRep, however we are interested in continuing to monitor whether particular constitutional design elements used here might exacerbate issues with petty corruption. Finally, we will be watching to see if any specific efforts to reduce agency costs arise during the expected life of this constitution.
Ultimately, increasing agency costs, starting from now, are a strong signal of Constitutional inadequacy and a signal for reform.

Creating public goods
The flip side of agency costs is what economists call public goods. These are non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods such as chain uptime, the infrastructural predicates of economic efficacy, reliable transaction settlement, and the like.
The Cardano Constitution, primarily concerned with the preservation and growth of the Cardano Blockchain, is unique among constitutions in that the public goods that it tends to create are deeply intertwined with the rights it seeks to guard. One can interpret the Tenets as securing to citizens the public goods created when the blockchain is performant, and ensuring that performance. This will be an interesting area to monitor and evaluate as governance actions, especially involving roadmaps, parameter changes or hardforks receive ratification from the Constitutional Committee and we learn more about what citizens of Cardano need in order to participate.
The ultimate public good guarded by the Constitution is the securing of the common resource of the treasury (note that security is here the non-rivalrous good, not the treasury. Think of it like national security for geopolitical institutions). In this area, the constitution delegates a lot of responsibility to community developed institutions. The evaluation of Budget Processes that emerge from institutions like Intersect is an important sub-item in the evaluation of the success or failure of this Constitution, and is a specific area of interest I will be specializing in as a DRep.
It should be noted that it can be difficult to accurately link public goods production to specific design and text of a constitution, given that things like exogenous market shocks can, in a moment, erase or compromise a lot of deliberate production of these goods (think about a Cardano-wide marketing budget item launched into the teeth of some broader recessionary market force.) That being said, however, a careful and counterfactual inquiry might be able to establish some plausible relationships between the constitutional text and the observed level of public-good production.

These four mid-range criteria establish a broad framework under which we will turn to the fundamental question of “Is this Constitution any good?” But before we do that, I want to address one final critical perspective that I believe is valuable for evaluating not only this constitution, but all governance actions. It is essentially a comment on “minimum viable governance”, a Hippocratic approach to an absolute minimum floor for our standards of governance and a red line that should always be searched for in the vicinity of governance in the Cardano ecosystem.

2.2 A note on “Do no Harm”§

2.2.1 Hippocratic minimum viable governance
Recalling the caution above regarding leaning too strongly into either internal or external criteria in an evaluation, can there be a benchmark for constitutional success that is general, albeit not universal, in scope? To be so, it would need to be external to a fault, and indeed meant to be applied by an evaluator completely outside of the ecosystem, a true outsider. The use for such a criterion would be the potential citizen of Cardano, and though this constitution is not meant to consider their input, there is some benefit to be had by considering this external-only perspective. In the process of reaping that benefit, we are counseled for attention to a floor for constitutional performance. It also provides a unique frame of reference for considering a constitution during the moment in time when a constitution is being proposed or debated.
I offer a parsimonious account of a constitution likely to be accepted notwithstanding significant or deeply entrenched differences in internal criteria: A constitution is a legally authoritative written account of at least some of the institutions necessary for the operation of a governance regime over a clearly bounded space for some extended period of time.
And, given that definition, I believe we can converge on a single external criterion notwithstanding our different internal criteria: A constitution succeeds qua constitution so long as, and to the extent that, its design does not contain elements that are likely to conduce unintentionally to the breakdown or dissolution of effective governance functioning that it aims to enable. Like the Hippocratic oath, it rests on the obligation to “take care that … no hurt or damage” is inflicted via constitutional design

2.2.2 Avoiding self defeating constitutional design
Constitutions can engender self-destructive outcomes in several ways, and an application of the Hippocratic benchmark needs to start with some sense of when a design feature leads to institutional failure, including spiralling, or cascading, failure. By far the best source of insight on this issue is to look at why constitutions fail historically.
I do not intend to chart comprehensively the full range of endogenous design failures known to befall constitutional design, but I will call out two in particular that I have deep knowledge of and am particularly interested in evaluating within the governance ecosystem enabled by the Cardano Constitution.

Judicial Review
I specifically call out this design risk in my DRep profile. In short, Judicial Review (or Constitutional review, sometimes) vests in some role or office the power to review the actions of the government to ensure they follow the constitution. It is a critical part of constitutional checks and balances, but if not monitored carefully, this can become Judicial Supremacy, where the empowered office becomes the sole interpreter of the constitution, securing to itself unchecked power, which usually precipitates further unbalancing and unmooring of constitutional protections in response. The Cardano constitution enshrines Judicial Review in at least one office (Constitutional Committee), so this must be monitored.

Emergency Powers
Unlike Judicial Review, which is purely an endogenous design issue, the risks of emergency power emerge from the interaction of constitutional design with local political circumstances. The absence of emergency powers has been a known governance liability since Rousseau, due to the flexibility it gives to governance structures amidst uncertainty and complexity. But that same tooling is well known for cascading faults, where it becomes the sole means of rulemaking and governance.
In the Cardano Constitution Guardrails, PARAM-06a (x) and the following change triggers and, to some extent, the counter indicators, are the most obvious instances of emergency governance, essentially overcoming hardwired requirements for the path-to-active of any particular proposed parameter change based on assessed severity of situations faced by the chain. That these emergency considerations are tightly constrained, and primarily concerned with the extensively researched risks of exogenous price shock, is a source of assurance that Emergency Powers are not a significant risk. However, the constitution will need to be tested in real circumstances, as it governs a deeply technical piece of infrastructure where there may be many opportunities for emergent re-use or re-deployment of capabilities in surprising or clever ways. Emergencies have a way of surfacing such characteristics, and we should be cognizant in those moments of what we are learning about the constitutional design, as much as the guardrails/technical specifications.

2.3 Is the Cardano Constitution any Good?§

While I am most interested in evaluating this Constitution as something that has a trajectory and must be investigated and monitored over time in a rigorous way, this rationale would not be complete without asking the question that describes this section. This question is not: Was the delegate endorsed constitution successful? But: As a constitutional text, is it any good? In other words, does the delegate constitution have properties that make it deserving of being implemented?
The framework outlined above is useful for this evaluation process over time, but at each point of evaluation will need to be adapted developmentally to fit that specific moment. What follows are the nine criteria that surface for me when asking: Is the Cardano delegate endorsed constitution any good?

2.3.1 Formal Qualities
Formal qualities include concision, clarity, and logical coherence. How well is the text written, how clear is it in structure and organization, and do the parts add up to a logically coherent whole?
There is reasonable empirical evidence that brevity contributes to the longevity of constitutions. The factors are complex, but the main ones are that brevity introduces less opportunity for error, and also that it requires more general language to be concise, which allows more opportunity for interpretation, another key characteristic observed in constitutional longevity.
The Cardano Constitution should not be expected to be the briefest version of a constitution due to the technical governance requirements of the blockchain. However we can still expect a concise document. To that end, the delegate endorsed constitution is impressive. Despite collecting volumes of feedback over the course of the workshopping period, the result was a preamble shortened from 613 words to 243, and this pattern continues across all sections, with clarity improvements every step of the way. Article VII regarding the Constitutional Committee will need to be monitored as it is very lengthy, with far more sections than similar roles. The CC sections of the constitution have a little bit of loose language around things like “from time to time” as a unit of evaluation, but overall is clear. I do appreciate this tension for this particular role, however, due to the aforementioned risks of Judicial Review, a power that is constitutionally and structurally delegated to this role. The length of Article VII is partly accounted for by the number of discrete limits that are described for this role, which may end up being critical factors in preventing a breakdown of separation of powers.
The extensive process of clarifying terminology and definitions is highlighted in the supporting documentation and shows in the precision of the language in each section. There are also no areas where the language, in and of itself, is ambiguous. I do not anticipate any major political conflict over “what did the designers mean here?”
The logical order and structure also makes sense, and in particular I want to highlight its “fitness” from the perspective of systems, or complexity theory. Natural structures that I see reflected in this constitutional structure are (1) a high level preamble and series of rights and guardrails which effectively bound the document and the system it governs (boundaries/similarities); (2) an article that describes a broad framework for diversity in the Cardano community (asymmetry/differences); and (3) an article describing how differences interact within that bounded system via the governance rules (exchange/connection). These conditions (similarities/differences/connection) are key conditions to establish to foster emergent outcomes, and it is good to see that natural framework appear here.
Further articles establish domains of governance, including roles (DRep, SPO, CC) and drivers (budget). The final article lays out a change process for the Constitution. Separating the guardrails out into a detailed technical appendix is an excellent way to keep the main body of the text tight and accessible to the lay-reader, while still enshrining the guardrails as a constitutional institution.
I do find it interesting that not only does the budget get its own article after not being a part of the early draft constitution debated by the delegates, but that this article is prioritized in the structure of the constitution, appearing before the articles that identify and define the key governance roles of the community. I tend to think of the budget as the primary public good that the constitutional institutions are tasked with delivering. As such, it makes sense that it has its own article to guide the community in the creation and coordinating of budget making/administering institutions. Its placement in the structure indicates, perhaps, a first-order citizen status that has been intuited about the budget, i.e. that effective delivery of this public good (outcome) is a priority over the domains responsible for it (process). There is a tension here, between outcomes and processes, ends and means. One end of this polarity can, at best, be seen as prioritizing the usefulness of this Constitution and the institutions it enables. The other end of the polarity can be seen as prioritizing their meaningfulness. At worst this tension could devolve into capture of the public good and of the offices tasked with delivering it (ends justify means type thinking) for good or ill. I will be monitoring this aspect closely.

2.3.2 Channeling Political Conflict
As described in the evaluative framework, we want to see the anticipation of political conflict, and paths for resolution of that conflict via the institutions enabled by this constitution. I believe this constitution, and the overall design of governance on Cardano, is a particularly excellent example of how to do this.
This begins with scoping, by setting clear boundaries on what will be political. The tenets can be improved in this regard, but this is not their main function (we will return to them in 2.3.3). The scoping is primarily set by the governance action structure and descriptions, where what can be governed is standardized into a lightweight, yet comprehensive list of possible actions. The constitution enshrines minimal but useful standards for submission of the actions that should leaven extreme aspects of the discourse, from requiring specific pieces of evidence in some cases, to prescribing a basic format for submission to make them archivable and comparable. From there, different actions have different constitutional requirements, roughly approximate to the anticipated level of political conflict expected. Examples include highly technical changes to the blockchain being required to pass through a series of community created validation protocols with clear constitutional requirements, or budgets needing to meet specifications before submission.
Finally, these actions are submitted as formal actions, given clear time limits for discussion and ratification via both democratic processes (DReps and/or SPOs) as well as constitutional fidelity oversight (CC review).
At every stage we can see how political conflict is bounded, moderated and funnelled into a consent mechanism that has high potential for legitimacy.
The only issue that I see that needs monitoring, is the bottleneck that occurs at the point of governance action submission, the very beginning of the process. Submission requires a fee, which is set and tuned as a built in parameter in the constitution. This parameter is part of a governance mechanism for attending to a polarity that exists between security and inclusion. As such, it is not something where we should expect a solution, but rather a continual process of assessing where we should be on that polarity according to our tolerances for security and inclusion risks and harm. When fees are too high relative to the security we gain from that, access to the institutions that channel political conflict to useful ends will be limited or eliminated, and that political conflict could break out in unproductive or harmful ways that delegitimize the constitution.

2.3.3 Rights protection
Here I am referring to both the number and quality of rights enshrined in the constitution. As noted earlier, this version of the Cardano Constitution does not set out to enshrine rights specifically, instead adopting “Tenets” that attempt to describe a fundamental relationship between participants in the ecosystem and the structure of the ecosystem itself, as represented by immutable data recorded on a blockchain. These tenets can be evaluated in a methodical way over time to hopefully surface explicit rights of Cardano citizens that are constitutionally protected.
Overall this is an area that requires extensive development and improvement. Issues faced, in my opinion, revolve around creating an appropriate framework for thinking about the nature of the cost of transactions on the Cardano blockchain. When we interrogate the tenets, we find that there are many threads leading back to transaction costs. At present the most important transaction cost to unpack is the fee structure. This and the monetary policy need to be folded into the constitutional framework in a more broadly coherent way than as a parameter. The reason this will be helpful in iterating the constitutional protection of the rights of Cardano citizens, is that the most basic and universal activity that can be conducted in this ecosystem is a blockchain transaction, and this fee that accompanies those transactions violates already pre existing rights to freedom from force. This violation must be reconstructed constitutionally as the consent of the governed (this won’t be difficult as we already have broad consent to the fee structure and monetary policy), which then creates the subset of rights that this constitution can protect, all cohering back to the original rights possessed by the Cardano citizen. This process is too complex to develop here, but it will continue to be advanced and encouraged by this DRep to all who will listen.
Without rooting Cardano citizen rights in the fundamentals of the ecosystem (transaction fees and how they are handled by constitutionally enabled institutions and processes), the risk is that any attempts to iterate citizen rights will be a source of political conflict with no path to resolution via constitutional institutions. The expected result if not done properly will be that a list of ad-hoc claims on public goods will dominate the conversation.
This is such a serious issue, the lack of explicit rights protection, that I must thoughtfully consider voting “No” on ratification. The mitigating factor here is the presence of the Tenets in Article I, which establish both a start and a space for development of these frameworks.

2.3.4 Democraticity
This made up word describes, for me, an evaluative practice not of asking if a process is democratic and rooted in the consent of the governed, but rather that is meant to capture how far along on the continuum from less to more democratic a constitution is.
We are specifically looking for the touchstones of participatory governance and inclusion. A subtle layer we also look for is to identify if differences are enabled, or if constitutional design is likely to homogenize participants over time.
This delegate endorsed constitution is extremely strong in this regard, with a caveat explained momentarily. The strength shows up in multiple ways, from the participatory process enabled early in the CIP process, to the workshops and conventions where the design was iterated and advanced, to the final version with its innovative approach to liquid democracy.
Differences have, and have had, plenty of space to breathe in this process, with significant differences receiving direct attention from designers and facilitators, in tension with time limits and other constraints that were imposed on the process. There is also no claim of this document or process to anything resembling perfection, and I found the whole process to be underwritten by an honest, if human and fallible, effort to try our best.
The caveat is, of course, the nature of the voting mechanism (one coin, one vote). Unlike many lay-evaluators of voting systems, I have an open mind about what different systems can accomplish, and of the complexity underlying systems that have been in development for some time. For example, I hesitate to put a label like “plutocracy” (governance of the few, in particular the wealthy) on this governance model, and I also hesitate to indict plutocratic voting methods generally, if they have been bounded in particular ways. While not technically plutocratic (which is a term reserved for human governance) there are healthy examples of natural ecosystems that govern themselves on a resource or “wealth” basis. These ecosystems are characterized by their longevity, resistance to disruption, and the persistence and preservation of the underlying governance resource. We may be able to learn from these examples to find something unique and valuable about our own ecosystem.
Despite these nuances, I do believe we will experience stratified participation, and weakened democratic processes, and I will be monitoring closely to gauge where constitutional design can enable effective inclusion and participatory impact.

2.3.5 Temperance
Temperance is the concept of delimiting the scope and power of government. We want to evaluate things like how the power of office-holders is limited, or how political stakes are lowered. We also want to encourage moderation and methodical deliberation (see 2.3.6 for more detail on deliberation). Institutionally, we want to look specifically at instances of separation of powers and checks and balances.
This constitution does reasonably well in these areas, though we will highlight several outstanding issues.
To begin with, “officeholders” is well defined as governance roles in the ecosystem, and these descriptions include constitutional requirements (for example disclosure when someone holds multiple recognized governance roles, or requirements for codes of conduct). The Constitutional Committee role, in particular, has many requirements and clarifications spelled out explicitly in the constitution text, which, as noted earlier, may be a key to keeping the Judicial Review power of the office from sliding into judicial supremacy.
Starting with the CC, and especially its ability to rule on the constitutionality of most governance actions, how does this constitution limit the office? One way is with a term limit parameter that encourages 3 year terms, forbids terms longer than 4 years, and ensures a minimum term of 3 months (all times are approximate, as they align specifically to a number of epochs). Terms are staggered, and membership of the committee can vary as needed between 3-10 members. The current number of 7 during ICC bootstrapping seems conservative and appropriate as it creates a larger quorum requirement.
The biggest check on the power of the CC is the inability to weigh in on governance actions that reform the membership of the committee, or which pause their activity until CC voluntarily reforms. This power is held primarily by the SPOs who can initiate those governance actions, and those actions have currently the lowest ratification thresholds required of any voting action (51%+). The SPOs themselves have the power to initiate hard forks, to enact critical security parameters and to vote independently of DReps on some governance actions. The SPOs, aside from only being able to vote on a limited subset of governance actions, and having a constitutionally mandated disclosure requirement for when they are participating in more than one governance role, have no other checks and balances. It could be argued that existing protocol parameters governing economic feasibility and sustainability of SPOs are a form of check that carries over to the constitution via parameters. It could also be argued that SPOs hold a “super-veto” power in that they can initiate or not a hard fork completely outside of the context of all constitutional governance. It is unclear at this time what kind of risk profile this is in practice, but it is clear that it overlaps with risks associated with multi-pool operation and low decentralization index scores. I don’t believe it is urgent to monitor this, but continued understanding of the issue should be sought.
Finally the DReps have one power they exercise, which is voting participation on all governance actions, itself an extension of the basic democratic principles aspired to by the Constitution, and their most consistent form and practice. The only check the DReps have on other offices is that they may participate in the votes that limit CC power. DReps also have an interesting dynamic that must be monitored, which is that it has something like a power curve related to DRep participation rates (number of actively voting DReps and amount of delegated stake). When participation rates are low in relation to the amount of ADA delegated to abstain (with auto-abstain technically a DRep) and to “no confidence”, the power of the role is minimal, and would not be able to effectively hold the power of the other offices in check. At high participation rates, the power of the office is capped in relation to other offices. This participation issue is well understood among the designers of this governance protocol and remains a sticky issue. It is anticipated to be primarily a bootstrap problem, however we see early indications that CEX auto-abstain plays a role in the landscape of citizen participation. We do not believe this is ultimately resolvable via constitutional design, and is rather a social issue, to be solved through social channels.

2.3.6 Deliberative Capacity
This describes the extent to which a political system possesses structures to host deliberation that is authentic, inclusive, and consequential. I break it out separately from temperance because its virtues are not just to foster consensus and moderation. Properly conducted deliberation, under the right conditions, has also the distinct property of producing epistemically superior solutions.
In the design and formation of the constitution we see a deliberative capacity that is at odds with itself in many respects. For example, in workshops held around the world a tremendous amount of bandwidth and space was committed to understanding and interpreting draft constitutions and challenges faced and how to approach and ultimately solve for many of them. However the feedback consistently received from the sessions was that while what was covered was excellent and a valuable experience, there was frustration from participants trying to surface anything outside of a narrow scope desired by the facilitators and initial draft designers. While the claim to constraints and limitations regarding time are heard and understood, the fact remains that much deliberative capacity was shut down in the process of designing the delegate endorsed constitution. This would indicate that this constitution may not contain epistemically superior solutions, and that this should be acknowledged so that the deliberative capacity can be expanded to receive that information sooner than later.
In terms of what the constitution itself is designed to enable, the two primary contributors to deliberative capacity are general governance action parameters such as rules that establish how much time is allowed for ratification, and specifications listed in Article IV that are concerned with ecosystem budget. There are no real requirements or enabling elements for SPOs, DReps or CC members to deliberate with each other (though it should be noted that this is being done in practice, extra-constitutionally). There are some areas in the DRep constitutional sections that specify the need for tools and spaces that allow ada holder delegation to DRep. In practice we see these spaces (gov.tool, tempo, etc.) attempting or planning on adding discussion spaces, but again, this is not anything being encouraged explicitly in the Constitution. Article III Section 6 does task the community with the need for creating these spaces, but it remains to be seen if that leads to specific budgetary support or separate treasury support for actual deliberative capacity (in theory, the CC would have to rule such a request constitutional).
The Article IV Ecosystem Budget is interesting in this regard as it specifies many mandates around how funds should be administered or how a budget process is required. These requirements, while not explicitly enabling deliberative capacity, certainly beg the question, and in practice the budget process coming out of intersect has indeed proven to be deeply deliberative, within its own scope.
The Article IV sections also point us towards a secondary source of deliberative capacity, which is the info action governance action, whose sole use seems to be to socialize and prompt discussion or deliberation. It remains to be seen how consistent that practice is, and whether constitutional design can encourage it more, as it does with requiring an info action be submitted for any budget.
A final secondary source of deliberative capacity is the guidance in the constitution to compensate DReps and CC members, and for the constitutional enshrinement of rewards for SPOs (though existing rewards would be expected to cover extra governance activity conducted by SPOs). However, it is not clear that incentives would lead to more deliberative capacity. In Catalyst, incentivizing reviewers resulted in less net capacity, as non-deliberative agents dominated the space to collect the incentives. It is absolutely clear to me that no incentives should be attempted for DReps or CC members until assurances can be established that doing so will not result in a net loss of deliberative capacity. This is very important and this DRep will be monitoring activity in this area closely.

2.3.7 Value representativeness
Does the constitution represent the values of the population that will be governed by it? This complex question requires some scoping to be done, by establishing in advance of implementation what those values may be, through polling or similar. Outside of hearing the stories of potential citizens, there is really no good way to surface this criteria.
Again, the process used to create the delegate endorsed constitution deserves credit here, as it did a good job of getting many and varied voices gathered, especially with the final conventions held in Argentina and Kenya. The archivist documentation provided for that, as well as the many conversations this DRep has had with attendees of those conventions (this DRep did not attend the convention). To the degree that these delegates have endorsed this version of the constitution is a good sign that the totality of the values represented by them will at minimum not be harmed or violated. We should also keep in mind that participants in this process, through its many layers, can be considered to be biased towards the value of a constitution, and in particular this constitution. The real test is whether the constitution reflects the values of the polity at large, i.e. how representational was the sample of delegates who traveled the whole road to develop this constitution?
Still, this does not tell us as much about what has been specifically included in the constitutional text or design to explicitly represent the community. The preamble speaks to some values and it should be noted that it differs greatly in tone and timbre from the draft version. Besides being tighter overall, the preamble now is quite precise about the ideas behind each paragraph and the choice of words used. We submit that this concision reflects “value pruning”, with the most representative values making the final cut. This is a strong indicator for the relevance and meaning of this document, but it will need to be monitored for any lack of recognition of segments of community values going forward.

2.3.8 Adaptability
Fitness and coherence are important qualities that we expect from a constitution, so upon evaluating so many domains of fitness, we turn necessarily to the ability of the Constitution to enable its own transformation to evolve and continue to make sense into the future.
There are two ways of approaching this. Firstly, we want to consider the specific amendment procedures included within the design of the constitution. Article VIII describes concisely the requirement that the Constitution be amended as needed to meet the needs of the community. As a side note, this same article describes the constitution explicitly as a “living document”. In academic constitutional parlance this does not just mean a document that needs to and is likely to change, but indicates an incompatibility with a constitutional interpretation method called “originalism” where the constitution is meant to be interpreted according to what was intended by its original designers. There is a wide array of alternative interpretation frameworks that are compatible with “living document” so it does not endorse any particular method so much as it shuns one in particular. We will have to monitor this going forward to see if there is anything to this distinction.
The constitutional amendment governance action (4. New Constitution or Guardrails Script) handles this process securely by requiring an entirely new constitution to be submitted when amended, and for the previous constitution hash to be referenced in the same governance action.
In addition to Article VIII, the guardrails specify their own amendment process using the same governance action workflow. It isn’t clear that the overlap of protocol parameters and guardrails will require the same sort of technical oversight of community institutions enabled by this constitution (for example the oversight of the technical steering committee). This may need to be clarified in the future in the constitution.
The second way of approaching the criteria of adaptability is to ask whether the amendment process applies to what is sometimes seen as the untouchable core of a constitution or only to its more superficial layers.
While the amendment design in this constitution appears to leave everything open to change, including using the strong language around being a living document, it should be noted that while it could change any parameter around CC or DRep roles for example, it can’t change the fundamental nature of those roles as implemented in CIP-1694 and the enacting hardforks, Chang and Plomin. In practice CIP-1694 could be modified or extended to change these fundamental features, or an entirely new CIP could be submitted. The result would be a hardfork initiation governance action and then what happens next is unclear. In theory the CC may be required to vote against the changes as unconstitutional, if the new governance version were unstable or incompatible with CIP-1694. It’s an interesting thought experiment, and I’m not aware if it has been brought up before in public forums, but the scenario surfaces a lot of characteristics and risks with our governance landscape. This DRep will continue to maintain a state of inquiry around this..

2.3.9 Expected Durability
Finally, given that the previously discussed Adaptability criterion has the potential to introduce instability (especially over time as small amendments and changes add up) we can ask a simple question about likelihood of success. It would be troubling to conclude across these criterion that the Cardano Constitution was “good” if it had no chance of making a lasting difference in the world.
The biggest risks to durability may involve the disposition of large pools of aggregated governance power: ADA holding “whales”, multipool operators, CEXs, and DRep “whales”. Anywhere the ADA governance token aggregates is a vector for forces of unknown direction and great magnitude.
To this DRep’s knowledge, mitigation of these risks is handled in a social manner, via off-chain methods, if they are handled at all. The guardrails and the guardrail script are the obvious place to interrogate this issue, but we do not see a viable path there without some other kind of constitutional design, such as a deliberate change in voting protocol.
I would suggest that expected durability is a major risk, but that every day it doesn’t surface is one day closer to understanding both the dynamical nature of this risk, as well as ways to enshrine assurances against it into constitutional design.

2.4 Is the Cardano Constitution Great?§

I want to consider a final criterion. This criterion is irrelevant if the constitution is not at least “good”, if it does not have broad feasibility and potential to enable that which it sets out to accomplish. At a minimum, such a constitution must satisfy the hippocratic question surfaced in section 2.0 of this rationale, to “do no harm”. But if these benchmarks are reached, I feel we are obligated to ask about one final benchmark.

Does this constitution inspire us?
Is it beautifully written? The preamble has its moments, but to really score points with this criteria, we would want to be sure that every section was as concise and relevant as possible. In particular, this constitution could tighten up Article VII (CC role) and consider if there is a more fundamental way to express what is being expressed in Article IV (budget). Consider, for example, that the budget is the primary public good that this constitution aspires to, but perhaps what we really aspire to is a broader sense of the public good that this constitution can enable. Perhaps the budget is only a piece of something larger and more meaningful.
Is this constitution likely to generate emotions such as love and admiration among its own people and beyond, and among current and future generations? Again the preamble hints at this, but the tenets let us down. Not because they are inadequate or problematic, but because they simply aren’t an expression of explicit rights, not yet. That gap is palpable.
But then we see interviews with participants in the Constitutional Conventions in Argentina and Kenya, and we see the joy they express, the belonging and patriotism they feel for an unknown, unseen, citizenship. We see them enthusiastically tell us that “their life has changed.”
No, the Cardano Constitution is not “great”.
But we might be close.

3.0 Conclusion§

We have established an initial evaluation of the delegate endorsed Constitution, and concluded, with reservations, some small and some significant, that on the whole this Constitution deserves to be thought of as a “good” constitution for the community, and for it to be ratified and successfully implemented.
Perhaps more importantly, we have established a broad evaluation framework that can be used to continuously evaluate the trajectory of this constitution and the institutions that it enables. This was a lot of work now, but we expect this will make the job ahead of us easier and clearer.
Thank you for reading this rationale and for supporting it with your delegation. With this framework in place, we intend to continue to evaluate Cardano governance actions from the perspective of constitutional scholarship, complexity and systems theory, and, above all, usefulness and meaningfulness to the citizens of Cardano.

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