Institutions Without a Higher Authority: A Test Case in Distributed Constitutional Design

This paper develops and examines a proposed institutional architecture termed the guarantor circuit: a governance subsystem designed to steward a distributed national resource without holding ownership of that resource, exercise a limited and reactive capacity to suspend legislation already challenged through a citizen-initiated process, and remain removable through a documented and verifiable threshold of citizen distrust rather than through appointment or removal by the executive, legislature, or judiciary. The paper situates this architecture within the broader literature on guarantor institutions, central-bank independence, sovereign wealth fund governance, distributed systems, and mechanisms for collective aggregation and institutional accountability. It distinguishes the proposed configuration from adjacent institutional forms by focusing on the simultaneous combination of non-ownership stewardship, reactive suspensive capacity, and distributed recall. The proposed architecture is then subjected to a partial structural stress test. The analysis examines the verifiability and integrity of the recall mechanism, resistance to coordinated informational pressure, administrator independence, and relevant questions of delegated authority and liability. The paper also considers why the specific combination of properties identified in the model appears to be absent from the closest existing institutional literature. The analysis does not present the guarantor circuit as a proven or implementation-ready governance mechanism. Instead, it identifies several unresolved requirements, including the operational definition of the unit of account for expressions of distrust, the absence of an internal comparative sample, and the problem of compensating harm caused before a recall mechanism can take effect. Given these limitations and the absence of an implemented precedent for the proposed configuration, the paper recommends that any future implementation be approached through bounded experimental or sectoral settings before consideration of broader deployment. The contribution is therefore presented as a formalized design specification and partial stress test intended to provide a precise object for further institutional, legal, technical, and empirical examination.