The framework's predictions in [§9.1.3](<9.1.3 What is Predicted.md>) are tested against the empirical and theoretical literature on rights-architecture performance across multiple national configurations.

*First.* Constitutionalized socioeconomic rights produce different outcomes. The South African Constitution (1996) provides the strongest empirical test. Sections 26–29 explicitly enshrine rights to housing, healthcare, food, water, social security, and education as justiciable claims (claims a court can directly enforce). The Constitutional Court built a “reasonable measures” doctrine through *Government of South Africa v Grootboom* (2000) and *Minister of Health v Treatment Action Campaign* (2002). The doctrine has produced measurable policy effects on housing-program design and on HIV-treatment access (Liebenberg 2010, *Socio-Economic Rights*; Bilchitz 2007, *Poverty and Fundamental Rights*).

India's Directive Principles (Articles 36–51) are policy directions the legislature is meant to follow but that courts cannot directly enforce. The Supreme Court has progressively incorporated them into Fundamental Rights jurisprudence: the right to food via *PUCL v Union of India* (2001 onwards, leading to the National Food Security Act 2013); the right to education via *Unni Krishnan v State of Andhra Pradesh* (1993), then constitutionalized as Article 21A (2002); and the right to health via *Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samity v State of West Bengal* (1996). The Brazilian Constitution (1988) Articles 6–7 enshrine social rights with documented policy effects on the Bolsa Família program and the Sistema Único de Saúde performance.

Cross-national comparative work documents the same structural effects across diverse jurisdictions. Jung, Hirschl, and Rosevear (2014, *American Journal of Comparative Law*) surveyed socioeconomic-rights provisions across 195 country constitutions; Gauri and Brinks (2008, *Courting Social Justice*) examined judicial enforcement patterns across multiple jurisdictions.

*Second.* Negative-rights-only configurations produce substantive hollowing. The US empirical record is the canonical case. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights (1944) was articulated and not implemented; the subsequent eighty years document the precise patterns the framework predicts. Medical bankruptcy was the leading cause of personal bankruptcy through 2019 (Himmelstein et al. 2019 *American Journal of Public Health*). Housing-cost burden affects roughly half of US renters (Joint Center for Housing Studies *State of the Nation's Housing*, multiple editions). Food insecurity affects 10–15% of US households across decades (USDA Economic Research Service annual data). Educational-debt outstanding grew to roughly $1.7 trillion by 2024 (Federal Reserve consumer-credit data). The pattern persists despite robust formal civil-and-political-rights protection through the Bill of Rights and the Civil-Rights-Era expansions. The empirical record confirms the prediction directly.

*Third.* Enforcement architecture matters more than formulation language. The Soviet Constitution (1936, 1977) and successor authoritarian-regime constitutions formulated extensive socioeconomic-rights provisions, yet delivered profoundly weaker substantive performance than the Nordic and Continental European arrangements whose formulations are nominally weaker but whose enforcement is robust. The Eurobarometer time-series data and OECD Better Life Index data document the cross-national pattern. Arrangements with strong enforcement architecture (Nordic countries, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland) outperform arrangements with strong formulation but weak enforcement on every constitutive metric. Comparative-constitutional scholarship documents the enforcement-vs-formulation distinction (Tushnet 2008 *Weak Courts, Strong Rights*; Gauri and Brinks 2008; Langford 2008 ed. *Social Rights Jurisprudence*).

The European Convention on Human Rights jurisprudence under the European Court of Human Rights provides the canonical strong-enforcement case at the international register; the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the Inter-American system provide comparison cases at varying enforcement strengths.

*Fourth.* Participation-condition grounding tracks democratic stability. The Eurobarometer trust-in-institutions data, the OECD Trust in Government data, and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) longitudinal dataset document the cross-national pattern. Arrangements that explicitly ground rights in citizenship and substantive participation (Nordic countries, Germany, Netherlands) display higher institutional-trust and democratic-stability scores than arrangements that ground rights in formal non-interference without participation grounding. The pattern is empirically robust across multiple measurement approaches and multiple decades. The Acemoglu-Robinson *Why Nations Fail* (2012) and *The Narrow Corridor* (2019) literature on inclusive-vs-extractive institutions documents the participation-condition pattern at the broader political-economic register.

*Fifth.* Deeper participation-condition articulation tracks disability-rights and minority-rights performance. The cross-national comparison confirms the prediction. Arrangements with deeper participation-condition articulation (Scandinavia, Germany, Netherlands) display stronger disability-inclusion metrics (employment rates, accessibility, integrated education, as documented by OECD disability-employment data and European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights survey data), stronger minority-rights enforcement, and lower disparities across protected categories than arrangements with formal non-interference articulation. The US empirical record on disability-employment gaps (BLS data), racial-disparity persistence on every measurable margin (Pew Research; Brookings; the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality), and the gap between formal civil-rights protection and substantive outcome equality documents the pattern in the negative.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD, 2006) provides the international participation-condition articulation; ratification status and implementation-record empirical literature (Lord and Stein 2008 onwards) documents the pattern.

*Sixth.* Participation-condition-grounded rights resist authoritarian backsliding more robustly. The empirical record on twentieth- and twenty-first-century democratic backsliding documents the pattern. Arrangements where rights protection is formal-legal without substrate-grounding (Hungary post-2010 under Fidesz; Poland 2015–2023 under PiS; Turkey post-2016) experienced more rapid hollowing of formal-legal protections than arrangements where rights protection runs through deep participation-condition grounding. The Nordic systems resisted similar populist pressures over the same period. Germany's Grundgesetz combines “eternity clauses” (Article 79.3, the provisions deliberately made unamendable) with substantive social-state grounding (Article 20). The European Court of Human Rights provides a supranational backstop. The V-Dem democratic-backsliding indices and the comparative-authoritarianism literature (Levitsky and Way 2010 *Competitive Authoritarianism*; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018 *How Democracies Die*; Mounk 2018 *The People vs. Democracy*) document the structural pattern.

*Seventh.* Negative/positive distinction generates jurisprudential incoherence at boundary cases. The US jurisprudential record on rights-conflict cases documents the structural incoherence the prediction names: *DeShaney v. Winnebago County* (1989) on positive-rights non-existence; the property-rights-vs-subsistence-rights tradition culminating in *Lochner v. New York* (1905) and its overruling; the contemporary debate on housing-as-human-right vs property-rights. The South African Constitutional Court's *Grootboom* and *TAC* jurisprudence resolves equivalent cases more cleanly under the participation-condition reading. The Canadian Charter jurisprudence under Section 7 (life, liberty, and security of the person) provides a mid-position case where substantive content of formal rights has been progressively elaborated (e.g., *Carter v. Canada* 2015 on assisted-dying; *Chaoulli v. Quebec* 2005 on healthcare access).

*On theoretical convergences.* The framework converges on conclusions independently reached in: the capabilities tradition (Sen 1992 *Inequality Reexamined*, 1999 *Development as Freedom*; Nussbaum 2000 *Women and Human Development*, 2006 *Frontiers of Justice*); Shue's basic-rights argument (1980 *Basic Rights*); Marshall's social-rights tradition (1950 *Citizenship and Social Class*); the social-rights constitutionalization literature (Liebenberg 2010; Bilchitz 2007; Tushnet 2008); the deliberative-democratic and republican-citizenship traditions (Pettit 1997 *Republicanism*; Habermas 1996 *Between Facts and Norms*); and the participatory-democracy theorists (Pateman 1970). The convergence from analytic-philosophical, comparative-constitutional, capabilities-economic, and democratic-theoretic premises supports the robustness of the conclusions.

*What does not confirm the framework.* Strong-form libertarian accounts that treat rights as pre-political natural possessions (Nozick, *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* 1974, at strongest reading) predict that arrangements protecting only negative rights produce better aggregate outcomes than arrangements protecting socioeconomic rights. The empirical record across health, education, subsistence, and democratic-stability metrics refuses this prediction across multiple cross-national comparisons.

Strong-form welfare-statist accounts that treat civil-and-political rights as secondary to economic redistribution predict that authoritarian configurations delivering economic rights without civil-and-political rights outperform liberal-democratic configurations; the empirical record on Soviet-and-successor-state outcomes, and on contemporary comparisons of China against democratic comparators where comparable data is available, refuses this prediction.

Strong-form formalist accounts that treat rights protection as constituted by formulation rather than enforcement predict that constitutional articulation alone produces the substantive outcomes; the empirical record on the gap between Soviet-bloc rights-formulation and rights-performance refuses this prediction.

The framework's intermediate position treats civil-and-political rights and socioeconomic rights as articulations of one underlying commitment to participation conditions, with enforcement architecture mattering more than formulation language. The cross-national empirical record supports that position wherever each component has been measured independently.


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← [9.1.3 What is Predicted](<9.1.3 What is Predicted.md>) | [9.1.5 What is Concluded](<9.1.5 What is Concluded.md>) →
