Abstract

Drawing conceptual boundaries is one of the defining features of constitution-making processes. These historically situated operations of boundary making are central to the definition of what counts as “constitutional” in a political community. In this article, we study the operations of conceptual delimitation performed by the Constitutional Commission (1973–1978) that drafted the 1980 Chilean Constitution, the trademark of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Using the eleven volumes of the Commission’s Official Records as our textual material (10,915 pages and 80,005 distinct words), we apply vector semantics, spectral clustering and bigram graph-based analysis to explore conceptual boundaries and the behavior of specific keywords shaping the space of constitutional meanings. Our results identify the ways in which the Commission defines the normative horizon of the new social and political order by transforming old semantic references into a renewed conceptual framework. This analysis shows the immanent relations between political action and conceptual elaboration that underlie the creation of constitutional texts, as well as the potential of computational methods for the study of constitutional history and constitution-making processes.

摘要

绘制概念边界是宪法制定过程的定义特征之一。这些具有历史地位的划界操作对于在政治共同体中什么是“合宪”的定义至关重要。在本文中，我们研究了宪法委员会执行的概念划界操作（1973-1978）起草了 1980 年智利宪法，这是奥古斯托·皮诺切特独裁统治的标志。使用委员会的 11 卷正式记录作为我们的文本材料（10,915 页和 80,005 个不同的单词），我们应用矢量语义、谱聚类和基于二元图的分析来探索概念边界和塑造宪法空间的特定关键字的行为意义。我们的结果确定了委员会通过将旧的语义参考转化为新的概念框架来定义新社会和政治秩序的规范视野的方式。这一分析显示了构成宪法文本创建基础的政治行动和概念阐述之间的内在关系，