Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it over, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. 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.
Contestability
PartialShortfall · partially preservedDefinition (Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms, 2012)
This concept holds that anyone subject to a decision must have a real route to challenge it. They must be able to inspect the grounds for the decision, contest the outcome, and have the challenge answered. Legitimacy is not settled once by an election or an act of consent. It depends on that route remaining available. On this view, a political order is free when the people its decisions affect can contest them, whether or not its rulers are kind.
Analysis
A standing appeal channel now exists and has been tested in the field. AppealMod handled ban appeals in a Reddit community of over 29 million users in a four-month randomized experiment. ConGaIT gives clinicians a contest-and-justify control when they review an automated gait assessment. What keeps this short of Pettit's standard is the purpose of AppealMod. Its mechanism is friction, since appellants must provide more before a human looks at the appeal, and it works by selection. Moderators saw only 30% of appeals and under 10% of the toxically worded ones. The rate of granted appeals held steady, which is the paper's defense. However, a route that is deliberately made costly is not clearly a route available to everyone subject to a decision.
Non-domination
PartialShortfall · partially preservedDefinition (Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1997)
This concept holds that freedom is not the absence of interference. A person is unfree if someone holds unchecked power over them, even if that person never misuses it and means well. A benevolent master still dominates, and so does an authority whose workings cannot be seen. Legitimacy requires power to be checked, and good intentions are not enough.
Analysis
Pettit's test is not whether a channel exists but whether power is forced to track the interests of the governed. This approach is the first entry here that measures this at all. The randomized experiment reports roughly the same number of granted appeals as in the control condition, which is evidence that the filter did not quietly change outcomes. However, the check runs in the opposite direction from what the tradition requires. It was built to protect moderators' workload and to preserve their agency over each decision. What it shows is that the appellant's chances were not made worse. It does not show that the moderator's power was made answerable.
Public decision record
PartialShortfall · partially preservedDefinition (Common-law practice)
Rulings on challenges are written down, published, and citable. The legal order's interpretation of its own rules therefore accumulates in public, where it can be studied, invoked, and criticized. This record makes the legal order both predictable and legitimate, since nothing is settled in private and every decision leaves its reasoning on record.
Analysis
The design proposals specify a public record, in which each ruling on a challenge enters a record that can be cited later. This is what the tradition asks for. The systems that were built do not do this. AppealMod's appeals are settled privately between an appellant and a moderator, and ConGaIT's contest-and-justify exchanges stay inside the clinical record. Nothing accumulates in public, so no later challenge can be decided by reference to an earlier one. The record exists only in the design proposals.