The polity-scale gap: validated democratic mechanisms, from deliberative mini-publics to quadratic voting, that remain pilots because they are disseminated rather than installed.
Democracies possess a rich, validated repertoire of institutional innovations. Of the hundreds of citizens' assemblies of the deliberative wave, only a handful lead to documented policy reforms; quadratic mechanisms have, in the words of the field itself, not yet found many real-life applications.
The same five reasons apply, in institutional costume, and the same closing mechanism: Taiwan installed deliberation into the workflow of legislation (vTaiwan, Polis), while Victoria's mandated deliberative engagement met path dependency and 92% of councils continued as before. A statute asks for compliance; an institutional routine is compliance. The bottleneck is constitutional embedding, and legitimacy is the slowest clock. This is where RadicalxChange and ⿻ Plurality act as the fourth scale's catalysts and, for the other three scales, as the Plural Constitution.