Nicolin Decker has posted The Jurisdictional Signal Integrity Doctrine (JSI): Representation, Broadcast Power, and the Constitutional Architecture of Coherence on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper advances Jurisdictional Signal Integrity (JSI) as a constitutional diagnostic framework for understanding modern representative strain in the absence of constitutional violation. It argues that contemporary dysfunction within Congress and related institutions cannot be adequately explained by partisanship, polarization, or institutional misconduct alone. Instead, the paper identifies a structural condition—Representational Signal Misalignment (RSM)—in which the communicative signal environment surrounding representative institutions exceeds or bypasses the jurisdictional and deliberative architecture through which those institutions are constitutionally designed to operate.
RSM is introduced as a novel descriptive concept rather than a theory of liability, reform agenda, or regulatory proposal. It names a condition in which lawful speech, protected participation, and formal procedural compliance coexist with measurable degradation in deliberative capacity, accountability clarity, institutional endurance, and representative retention. Under conditions of RSM, translation gives way to performance, authority decouples from audience standing, and rational actors adapt through exit or architectural migration—even in the absence of bad faith, ideological extremism, or electoral defeat.
Drawing on constitutional structure, institutional economics, and systems analysis, the paper traces the emergence of RSM to a late-twentieth-century broadcast inflection (circa 1979–1981), when national visibility and continuous media exposure altered the incentive environment of legislative service without corresponding changes to constitutional design. Empirical patterns—including elevated congressional attrition, declining legislative throughput, and migration toward executive offices—are examined as systems-level signals rather than episodic political anomalies.
The paper further explains why existing constitutional doctrines—separation of powers, federalism, First Amendment jurisprudence, and election law—are ill-suited to identify or remediate RSM. Courts increasingly sense democratic instability yet lack vocabulary to distinguish architectural degradation from political disagreement. JSI supplies that vocabulary while respecting justiciability boundaries, enabling recognition without prescribing judicial intervention.
Importantly, the paper does not advocate speech restriction, institutional redesign, or enforcement mechanisms. It treats constitutional stability as dependent not only on lawful authority and protected expression, but on preserved coherence between signal scope and institutional role. By recovering foundational disciplines—jurisdictional fidelity, deliberative restraint, and bounded accountability—JSI reframes constitutional harm as a condition that may arise without breach, and constitutional fidelity as a practice that may require restraint rather than assertion.
In doing so, the paper offers a pre-crisis interpretive framework for courts, legislators, and scholars confronting lawful governance under transformed communicative conditions, and situates Representational Signal Misalignment as a durable analytic concept for understanding constitutional erosion without constitutional failure.