Methodology

A systematic search of arXiv and OpenAlex, extended by three rounds of citation chaining, screened 62,940 records against written inclusion criteria. The 3,056 records that meet them form the corpus that the paper counts, and 1,033 of them are methods. The site shows the records that we annotate in depth: every eligible record of our curated collection, plus every eligible record cited at least 50 times a year. This way, no heavily cited work in scope is missing. 79 curated records fall outside the criteria. They are listed as background and are not counted.

Each record has exactly one kind, and only methods count toward a regime. A method is a technical intervention specified precisely enough to reimplement and shown working by its own authors. Both conditions are required, so a governance scheme counts as a proposal until somebody builds and runs it. The grid counts the methods of the corpus, as Figure 2 of the paper does. Of the 192 records annotated here, 80 are methods. Benchmarks, analyses, applications, resources, proposals, and precedents from other disciplines stay indexed, searchable, and attached to their approach, but they are not counted.

We measure two things for each regime and keep them apart: how much of the regime is built, and how much of its tradition the built work carries over. The two are negatively correlated. For example, every approach in Constitutionalism has a working method, but together they carry over only about a fifth of the concepts of Hart, Fuller, and Raz.

Each approach is read against the concepts of its tradition, one concept at a time. Each reading also records whether the approach claims the concept. A concept that the approach claims but does not carry over is a shortfall. A concept that it neither claims nor carries over is an omission, which marks a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work.

Whether a reference resolves is recorded for each record as a separate field, not inferred from a free-text note. All 192 records are verified against an index.

Behind the 15 regimes are 56 source works from law, political theory, and philosophy, 73 named concepts drawn from them, and 198 readings of an approach against one of those concepts.