Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Contestability
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms (2012)
Anyone subject to a decision must have a real route to challenge it — to inspect the grounds it was made on, to contest the outcome, and to have that challenge answered. Legitimacy is not settled once by an election or an act of consent; it is held open by that route staying available. The test of a free system is not that its rulers are kind, but that their decisions can be contested by the people they affect.
Analysis
A standing appeal channel now exists and has been run in the field. AppealMod handled ban appeals in a Reddit community of over 29 million users across a four-month randomized experiment, and ConGaIT puts a contest-and-justify control in front of clinicians reviewing an automated gait assessment. What keeps this short of Pettit's standard is what AppealMod is for: its mechanism is friction, appellants must supply more before a human looks, and it works by selection — moderators saw only 30% of appeals and under 10% of the toxically worded ones. The grant rate held steady, which is the paper's defense, but a route deliberately made costly is not straightforwardly a route available to everyone subject to a decision.
Non-domination
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Philip Pettit, Republicanism (1997)
Freedom here is not the absence of interference. You are unfree if someone holds unchecked power over you — even if they never misuse it and mean well. A benevolent master is still a master, and so is an authority whose workings you cannot see. Legitimacy requires that power be checked, not merely well-intentioned.
Analysis
Pettit's test is not that a channel exists but that power is forced to track the interests of the governed, and this is the first entry here that measures the question at all: the randomized experiment reports roughly the same number of appeals granted as in the control, which is evidence the filter did not quietly change outcomes. The check runs the wrong way round for the tradition, though. It was built to protect moderators' workload and to preserve their agency over each decision, and what it demonstrates is that the appellant's chances were not made worse — not that the moderator's power was made answerable.
Public decision record
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Common-law practice
Rulings on challenges are written down, published and citable, so the system's interpretation of its own rules accumulates in the open, where it can be studied, invoked and criticized. The record is what makes the system predictable as well as legitimate: nothing is settled in private, and every decision leaves its reasoning behind it.
Analysis
The design proposals specify it: each ruling on a challenge enters a record that can be cited back, which is exactly what the tradition asks for. What was built does not do it. 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 the open, so no later challenge can be decided by reference to an earlier one, and the record exists on paper and nowhere else.