23.2 Amendments to the constitution

The engagement threshold \(\chi\) = 0.65 for amendments to the constitution is high. This is the minimum turnout, expressed as a fraction of resident citizens.

This ensures constitutional changes require broad, stable consensus, not just a motivated majority, and not just a short‑term coalition.

An initiative for the constitution needs high engagement to help ensure the great majority of people are thinking about it. An initiative for an amendment to the constitution remains open indefinitely. There is feedback about why it's not passing, that can prompt people to vote. The engagement will climb steadily towards whatever it needs to be if it's actually the case that it's a useful amendment that most people want. People can change their mind and change their vote. A high minimum engagement ensures an initiative takes time to pass helping give people time to think about it.

An indefinitely open initiative with transparent feedback naturally creates a self‑correcting engagement dynamic, and a high minimum engagement threshold becomes less of a barrier and more of a signal amplifier.

Indefinite duration plus feedback gives rise to a convergent process. An initiative doesn’t expire. That means no artificial deadline pressure, no “vote now or lose your chance”, and no need for frantic mobilization. Instead, the system behaves like a continuous‑time equilibrium process:

• If the initiative is important, people will hear about it repeatedly.
• If it’s not important, it will sit quietly and fail to gather momentum.
• If it’s borderline, the feedback loop (“why it’s not passing”) nudges people to think harder.

This is fundamentally different from legacy systems where turnout is a one‑shot event.

The feedback creates engagement elasticity. The moment you show current support, current opposition, and current engagement, and the reason it’s not passing (e.g., “needs 62% engagement, currently 0.54%), you create a natural incentive for people to participate. People don’t need to be mobilized by campaigns. The system itself tells them: “This initiative is close, and your vote matters.” That’s a powerful psychological driver.

Reversible voting stabilizes the process. Because people can change their vote, early votes aren’t “locked in”, people can update as they learn, the initiative’s trajectory reflects current public reasoning, not historical artifacts. This makes high engagement thresholds safer, because it's not freezing a moment in time. It's measuring a stable consensus.

The high minimum engagement gives a built‑in deliberation time. It forces the initiative to remain visible for longer, ensures more people encounter it multiple times, gives the public time to think, discuss, and revise, prevents “flash‑mob” constitutional changes, and ensures that only initiatives with broad, persistent, and informed support pass. In other words, the threshold isn’t just a gate. It’s a deliberation mechanism.

Engagement will climb if and only if the initiative is important. This is the key equilibrium insight. Because the initiative is permanent, visible, reversible and feedback‑driven, engagement becomes a function of importance. If the initiative is unimportant or fringe then engagement stagnates. If it’s genuinely important then engagement rises until it crosses the threshold. This is exactly what you want for constitutional change.