| 1. Domain | 1.1 Scope of the Domain | Boundaries | The range of phenomena the science includes and excludes. | Studies the rules, structures, and decision procedures that allocate authority, constrain actors, and define how power is exercised within a political system. Includes constitutions, electoral systems, party systems, legislatures, executives, courts, federalism, bureaucratic systems, veto players, agenda control, institutional stability, authoritarian vs democratic rule. Excludes informal norms unless formally institutionalized; excludes individual political behavior (covered in political mobilization) except as it interacts with institutional rules. |
| | Scale | The spatial, temporal, or organizational level at which the science operates (e.g., quantum, cellular, social, cosmic). | Operates at state and system scales, spanning long historical horizons and organizational layers: constitutional design, institutional change, government formation, rule-making systems, judicial–executive–legislative interactions, multi-level governance (local, regional, national, supranational). |
| 1.2 Ontological Commitments | Entities | The kinds of things assumed to exist within the domain (particles, organisms, agents, fields, etc.). | Political institutions; constitutions; legislatures; executives; courts; bureaucratic agencies; electoral laws; party systems; veto players; policy agendas; jurisdictions; formal rules; procedures; political authority structures; federal units; international institutions (when binding). |
| | Properties | The fundamental attributes these entities possess (mass, charge, genotype, preference, etc.). | Authority allocation; rule enforcement; separation of powers; centralization vs decentralization; procedural transparency; accountability; stability vs volatility; institutional capacity; veto strength; agenda-setting power; legal legitimacy; institutional rigidity or adaptability. |
| | Categories | The basic ontological types used to classify domain elements (substances, processes, relations, structures). | Regime types (democratic, authoritarian, hybrid); constitutional forms (presidential, parliamentary, semi-presidential); electoral systems (majoritarian, proportional, mixed); legislatures (unicameral vs bicameral); courts (constitutional, supreme, administrative); bureaucratic systems (merit-based, patronage-based); federal vs unitary governance. |
| 1.3 State-Variables | Variables | The measurable or definable properties that describe system conditions. | Distribution of authority; number and strength of veto players; electoral rules; party fragmentation; legislative procedure rules; executive powers; judicial independence levels; bureaucratic capacity indexes; centralization degree; institutional stability metrics; constitutional constraints; enforcement capacity. |
| | Parameterization | How variables encode and represent the system’s state. | Encoded through constitutional texts, statutory rules, procedural manuals, legislative voting thresholds, appointment rules, budgetary authority, veto-override formulas, federal allocation schemes, judicial review powers, and bureaucratic structures. |
| 1.4 Admissible Idealizations | Simplifications | Conceptual reductions used to make the domain tractable (point masses, rational agents, perfect gases). | Perfect rule compliance; fully rational institutional actors; complete enforcement; stable constitutional rules; clear separation of powers; absence of corruption; frictionless bureaucratic capacity; static institutional arrangements; fully representative party systems. |
| | Validity Conditions | The limits and contexts in which idealizations hold or break down. | Break down in high-corruption states; hybrid regimes; informal power networks; weak judiciaries; unstable constitutions; authoritarian consolidation; bureaucratic decay; institutional capture; crises with rapid rule changes; factional fragmentation; external intervention. |
| 1.5 Domain Assumptions | Structural Assumptions | Background ontological stances such as determinism, continuity, randomness, discreteness. | Institutions allocate and constrain political power; actors respond to formal rules; constitutional and statutory design affects political outcomes; enforcement capacity shapes stability; formal veto structure influences policymaking; authority is codified through legal means; political order depends on rule predictability. |
| | Implicit Commitments | Unstated but necessary assumptions that shape the field’s conceptual structure. | Assumes institutions matter independently of individual personalities; assumes rules are at least partially enforced; assumes formal structures shape incentives; assumes legal authority is recognized; assumes institutional change is path-dependent and structured. |
| 1.6 Internal Coherence Requirements | Consistency | The demand that domain concepts do not contradict one another. | Constitutional rules must not contradict legislative or judicial authority; electoral rules must align with seat allocation; separation of powers must avoid procedural deadlock; federal rules must match resource allocation; institutional categories must be mutually coherent; enforcement must match codified authority. |
| | Compatibility | The requirement that entities, variables, and assumptions fit together into a unified descriptive framework. | Requires harmony among constitutional design, electoral systems, legislative procedures, executive authority, judicial review, bureaucratic capacity, and multi-level governance; institutions cannot generate incompatible or unworkable decision procedures. |
| 2. Evidence Layer | 2.1 Observable Phenomena | Observables | The aspects of the domain that can produce detectable signals accessible to measurement. | Constitutional amendments; legislative voting patterns; executive decrees; judicial rulings; vetoes and overrides; bureaucratic performance metrics; regime transitions; institutional crises; party-system fragmentation; electoral-system effects on seat allocation; agenda control; policy gridlock; intergovernmental conflict in federal systems. |
| | Detection Limits | The boundaries of what can be resolved or sensed by current instruments or methods. | Inability to observe informal power networks; hidden veto players; opaque bureaucratic decision-making; off-the-record executive bargaining; judicial reasoning not fully revealed; unreliable authoritarian statistics; limited observation of internal party discipline; covert influence by interest groups; incomplete or biased institutional records. |
| 2.2 Measurement Systems | Units | Standardized quantifications (meters, seconds, volts, decibels, dollars, etc.) necessary for consistent comparison. | Legislative seats; veto thresholds; constitutional index scores; judicial independence scores; bureaucratic capacity ratings; regime-type indicators (Freedom House, Polity); rule-of-law indexes; centralization metrics; amendment frequency; executive decree counts; party fragmentation indexes. |
| | Instruments | Devices and tools (microscopes, spectrometers, sensors, surveys, detectors) used to produce measurements. | Legislative archives; constitutional databases; court decision repositories; election management systems; public-administration datasets; FOIA/records requests; international governance indexes; institutional-survey instruments; political-event coding systems; expert assessments. |
| 2.3 Operational Definitions | Definitions | Terms defined by specific measurement procedures, ensuring empirical clarity. | Regime type defined via codified criteria; separation of powers defined by constitutional authority; veto power defined by institutional veto thresholds; judicial independence defined via appointment/removal rules; federalism defined by division of authority; legislative productivity measured by bills passed; stability defined as persistence of institutional rules over time. |
| | Procedures | The explicit steps required to perform a measurement in a reproducible way. | Coding constitutional features; classifying regime type; recording legislative votes; tracking executive orders; mapping judicial review decisions; assessing bureaucratic performance; constructing institutional indices; measuring party-system fragmentation; documenting amendment procedures; verifying alignment of legal text and observed practice. |
| 2.4 Data Acquisition | Protocols | Formal processes for gathering data under controlled or standardized conditions. | Regular legislative-session data collection; consistent court-document archiving; systematic election-result reporting; standardized dataset construction for governance indicators; cross-national institutional surveys; panel-data construction for institutional change; metadata verification for political-event datasets. |
| | Sampling | Rules determining which subset of the domain is measured and how representative it is. | Sampling countries by regime type; sampling legislative votes across sessions; sampling courts by jurisdiction; sampling bureaucratic agencies; selecting periods of institutional crisis; stratified sampling across federal units; sampling policy areas for agenda-control analysis; sampling executive actions across administrations. |
| 2.5 Data Character & Format | Data Types | The form raw evidence takes (time series, spectra, images, counts, qualitative records). | Legislative roll-call matrices; constitutional and statutory text corpora; judicial decision datasets; executive decree logs; bureaucratic performance metrics; electoral-system parameters; institutional stability time series; governance index tables; expert-coded regime classifications. |
| | Resolution | The granularity or precision with which data is captured. | Determined by frequency of legislative sessions; granularity of voting records; completeness of court archives; administrative transparency; cross-national comparability; coding reliability; time precision of institutional changes (daily vs annual). |
| 2.6 Reliability & Calibration | Calibration | Adjustment procedures ensuring instruments produce accurate results. | Cross-validating institutional indices; triangulating legislative behavior with independent datasets; verifying judicial independence via multiple indicators; comparing expert-coded regime types with event-based measures; recalibrating party-system metrics with new electoral data; reconciling textual coding with observed practice. |
| | Error Characterization | Identification and quantification of noise, uncertainty, bias, and measurement error. | Coding errors; misclassification of regimes; incomplete legislative data; politically biased reporting; non-transparent bureaucracies; underreporting of executive actions; selection bias in court cases; subjective expert assessments; ambiguous or contradictory legal texts. |
| 3. Structural Layer | 3.1 Patterns & Regularities | Laws / Relations | Stable, repeatable patterns governing how observables behave across conditions. | Institutional stability laws; veto-player theory (more veto players → policy stability); agenda-setting effects; separation-of-powers dynamics; federal–central responsiveness patterns; electoral-system mechanical and psychological effects; coalition-formation regularities; institutional path dependence; judicial–executive–legislative interaction cycles; bureaucratic inertia and capacity relationships. |
| | Invariants | Quantities or properties that remain constant under transformations (symmetries, conservation laws). | Constitutional constraints; formal authority structures; jurisdictional boundaries; procedural rules; appointment rules; voting thresholds; independence conditions for courts; institutional “hard” veto points; codified checks and balances; federal allocation formulas; persistent party-system fragmentation levels under specific electoral rules. |
| 3.2 Causal Architecture | Mechanisms | Underlying processes or structures that produce the observed regularities. | Rules shape incentives; veto players block or enable policy change; agenda setters prioritize outcomes; electoral rules translate votes into seats; federal structures distribute power vertically; bureaucracies implement or distort policy; courts review executive/legislative action; constitutional rigidity prevents rapid change; institutional crises trigger reversion to emergency powers or informal governance. |
| | Pathways | Organized sequences of interactions forming a causal chain or network. | Constitutional rule → institutional incentive → actor strategy → policy outcome; Election system → party fragmentation → coalition bargaining → legislative agenda → enacted policy; Judicial appointment rule → independence level → decision patterns → executive constraints; Federal rule → resource allocation → intergovernmental conflict/cooperation; Bureaucratic rule → administrative capacity → governance outcomes. |
| 3.3 Theoretical Vocabulary | Concepts | Core terms that encode the domain’s structure (force, gene, equilibrium, field). | Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, electoral system, party system, veto player, agenda control, institutional capacity, bureaucracy, judicial review, regime type, rule of law, accountability, institutional stability, decentralization, constitutional rigidity, checks and balances. |
| | Classifications | Taxonomies, categories, or typologies that organize entities and relations. | Regimes: democratic, authoritarian, hybrid; Government forms: presidential, parliamentary, semi-presidential; Electoral systems: majoritarian, proportional, mixed; Party systems: two-party, multiparty, dominant-party; Courts: constitutional vs supreme vs administrative; Bureaucratic types: meritocratic vs patronage; Federal vs unitary vs confederal systems. |
| 3.4 Formal Representations | Equations | Mathematical constructs expressing laws, relations, or mechanisms. | Veto-player stability condition: more veto players → smaller winset of status quo; Seat allocation formulas (D’Hondt, Sainte-Laguë); Median-voter theorem; Constitutional constraint relations (e.g., override thresholds); Bargaining equations; Judicial review decision models; Federal-transfer formulas; Legislative productivity models. |
| | Models | Structured representations—mathematical, computational, or conceptual—used to predict and explain phenomena. | Spatial voting models; separation-of-powers game trees; coalition-formation diagrams; federalism hierarchy models; bureaucratic principal–agent models; judicial decision models; constitution-amendment probability models; authoritarian durability models; agenda-setting models. |
| 3.5 Idealized Structures | Simplified Models | Purposeful abstractions that capture essential dynamics while omitting irrelevant detail. | Fully rational institutional actors; clear separation of powers; complete rule compliance; no corruption; frictionless legislative procedure; perfect bureaucratic capacity; stable constitutions; absence of informal institutions; deterministic voting behavior; pure median-voter dynamics. |
| | Limit Conditions | Regimes where specific models or approximations hold (classical vs. quantum, linear vs. nonlinear). | Fail under corruption, factionalism, informal power networks, authoritarian consolidation, military intervention, judicial capture, weak administrative states, constitutional crises, rapid institutional change, hybrid or competitive-authoritarian regimes. |
| 3.6 Integrative Frameworks | Unifying Theories | Higher-order structures that connect disparate laws or mechanisms under a coherent whole. | Veto-player theory unifying institutional stability; principal–agent theory unifying bureaucratic, legislative, and executive oversight; spatial models unifying legislative and electoral behavior; constitutional political economy unifying institutions and incentives; comparative institutionalism unifying patterns across countries. |
| | Interdisciplinary Links | Points where the theory connects to adjacent sciences or larger explanatory systems. | Economics (institutional incentives, formal modeling); sociology (organizational structure, legitimacy); law (constitutional/judicial design); psychology (authority and compliance); public administration (bureaucratic performance); history (institutional development, path dependence). |
| 4. Method Layer | 4.1 Inquiry Design | Experimental Design | Structured plans for manipulating variables to test causal claims. | Randomizing institutional rules in lab experiments (e.g., voting procedures); designing controlled simulations of electoral systems; manipulating agenda-setting conditions; varying information provided to institutional actors; testing alternative rule structures in experimental parliaments or bargaining environments; modeling constitutional-amendment thresholds in controlled settings. |
| | Observational Design | Systematic approaches for gathering non-manipulated data (surveys, field studies, natural experiments). | Observing legislative behavior, court rulings, executive decrees, and bureaucratic decisions as they occur naturally; studying institutional crises, constitutional transitions, and regime changes; using natural experiments such as unexpected judicial decisions, reforms, or exogenous federal reallocations; monitoring institutional performance over time. |
| 4.2 Testing & Validation | Hypothesis Testing | Procedures for evaluating whether evidence supports or contradicts specific claims. | Testing veto-player predictions against policy stability; evaluating whether electoral rules produce expected levels of party fragmentation; testing judicial independence through decision autonomy measures; validating bureaucratic principal–agent models; assessing constitutional rigidity effects on amendment frequency; testing agenda-setting effects on legislative outcomes; evaluating institutional constraints on executive power. |
| | Replication | The requirement that results be independently reproducible under similar conditions. | Re-running institutional case studies with new archival data; replicating cross-national indices; re-estimating models of legislative productivity; re-analyzing voting patterns under alternative codings; testing robustness of judicial-independence scores; replicating simulations of coalition formation or bargaining under varied rules. |
| 4.3 Inference & Evaluation | Statistical Inference | Rules for drawing conclusions from noisy or incomplete data. | Estimating institutional effects using panel regressions, fixed effects, event studies, synthetic control, and structural models; evaluating formal-theory predictions against observed outcomes; measuring causal impacts of rules on stability, corruption, or efficiency; inferring veto power from policy outputs; estimating probability of constitutional change. |
| | Model Comparison | Criteria (fit, simplicity, predictive accuracy, robustness) used to evaluate competing models. | Comparing presidential vs parliamentary performance models; competing theories of judicial power (majoritarian vs counter-majoritarian); comparing different electoral-formula predictions; testing bureaucratic models (Weberian vs clientelist); contrasting hierarchical vs decentralized governance; comparing formal-institutional vs informal-institutional explanations. |
| 4.4 Error Management | Error Analysis | Identification and quantification of random and systematic errors. | Identifying misclassification in regime types; detecting biased legislative or judicial coding; distinguishing institutional effects from cultural or geographic confounders; separating rule-based effects from informal practices; correcting for measurement error in governance indicators; detecting selection bias in institutional change; handling missing or manipulated authoritarian data. |
| | Bias Control | Methods for minimizing subjective, instrumental, or procedural biases. | Using instrumental variables for institutional reforms; controlling for colonial/structural confounders; employing matched samples for cross-national comparisons; preregistering coding rules; using multiple independent coders; ensuring transparency in case-selection criteria; applying placebo tests in natural-experiment designs. |
| 4.5 Adjudication & Revision | Peer Scrutiny | Collective evaluation of claims through critique, review, and debate. | Reviewing coding procedures of institutional datasets; auditing constitutional-text interpretations; cross-validating results with alternative political-event datasets; replicating formal-model assumptions; reexamining causal claims for omitted variables; evaluating robustness to regime-type reclassification; revisiting conclusions when new archival data emerges. |
| | Theory Revision | Procedures for modifying, replacing, or discarding models based on new evidence. | Updating theories of separation of powers; revising models of legislative–executive interaction; adjusting electoral-system theories to accommodate new empirical anomalies; modifying explanations of judicial power expansion; incorporating informal institutions explicitly; revising bureaucratic-capacity theories after crisis episodes; reevaluating federalism models post-reform. |
| 4.6 Integrity Conditions | Transparency | Requirements to disclose methods, data, assumptions, and limitations. | Full disclosure of coding schemes, archival sources, institutional definitions, methodological choices, estimation methods, model assumptions, robustness checks, and limitations; transparent documentation of institutional typologies and cross-national coding decisions. |
| | Ethical Standards | Norms ensuring responsible conduct in experimentation, data handling, and publication. | Avoiding partisan distortion; protecting sensitive political data; accurate reporting of institutional differences; caution in interpreting authoritarian data; avoiding normative bias disguised as scientific inference; ensuring reproducibility; upholding academic neutrality in politically sensitive analyses. |