Constitutional Time: Who Binds Whom in the Data on Constitutions

Preprint, version 1.2 (3 November 2026), submitted to a journal for double-anonymous peer review (venue withheld); not yet peer reviewed. Version 1.2 aligns the text with the version submitted (two classical sources cited author-date; reference style) and adds a coloured preprint frame. Comparative records of constitutions code each text as it stands at a date. None describes the relation between the people who made the norms and the people bound by them. The article argues that this omission is the social-contract model in data form, derives from Andina's ontology of transgenerational action four things a diachronic record must contain for each norm, tests existing records (Comparative Constitutions Project, Constitute, Seshat, stability episodes) against them, illustrates three patterns of constitutional time on eight cases from four regions, and states four measures and a world-scale extraction pipeline. The deposit also contains the data and code: Python scripts that recompute the event counts and Figure 1 from the CCP Chronology v6.0 and Table 3 from the pilot; the 44 Seshat CrisisDB cases with constitutional change (CC BY-NC-SA); and a single-coder pilot classification of those cases by break type and access direction, with a note per case, published so that it can be independently re-coded.