Comparative institutional cases
Where has public cognition already been reorganized?
These cases are not ranked and are not offered as endorsements. Each isolates a design move—random selection, agenda setting, allocation, persistent deliberation, digital participation or computational synthesis—and asks what it contributes to the PolityAI problem.
A precedent can establish that an institutional mechanism is possible without establishing that its outcomes transfer to another jurisdiction or to machine-mediated public reasoning.
Case register
Mechanism, relevance, limit.
Comparative lesson
No single precedent supplies the whole architecture.
The cases distribute democratic functions differently. Some improve representation, some expose agenda formation, some make participation continuous, and some attach citizens directly to consequential allocation. PolityAI’s remaining question is whether machine-scale reasoning requires an additional constitutional layer for provenance, executable challenge and substitutability.