A consolidated proposal for preserving the knowledge, resources and authority to reconsider essential economic arrangements.
My illustration entitled: “The Unfinished Atlas of 2026” – an immense open atlas blends physical landscapes with semiconductor networks, shipping corridors and automated production. Its unfinished edges remain surrounded by people holding pencils, research and alternative designs. A technologically advanced world must remain open to informed, continuing public authorship.
Prosperity and the authority to direct it
I begin with a distinction that prosperity can obscure. People may benefit from an institution without possessing meaningful authority over its direction. Reliable electricity, affordable water, productive technology and shared financial returns can improve lives. They do not necessarily enable the people affected to investigate alternatives, question governing purposes or carry an informed proposal for change into a consequential decision.
Reauthorism is a proposed political-economic philosophy holding that essential economic arrangements should sustain independently governed knowledge, resources and practical capacity through which affected publics can reconsider their purposes, rules and structures—even during successful operation and after changes of ownership.
By essential arrangements, I mean systems whose operation, exclusion or disruption can seriously impair basic living conditions or economic participation, particularly where realistic alternatives are weak. By authorship, I mean supported authority to initiate reconsideration and pursue change through legitimate procedures. It includes the possibility of deliberate continuation. It does not require constant restructuring or unanimous personal control.
Consumer choice, ownership, consultation and compensation can strengthen agency. None necessarily supplies this continuing authority. A shareholder may lack influence; a citizen may be distant from a public enterprise; a compensated community may remain unable to question future decisions. Reauthorism asks whether practical reconsideration survives these differences in legal and financial position.
Intellectual debts and the proposed contribution
Institutions have never been beyond transformation. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen’s work on institutional change examines how power and ongoing struggles shape incremental transformation. [1] Reauthorism takes from this literature a reason to examine actual rules and practices, rather than treating institutional forms as fixed containers.
Robert Dahl’s A Preface to Economic Democracy connects economic control with political equality and defends workplace democracy. [2] My proposal shares the concern with effective authority, while extending attention to users, communities and others whose interests may differ from those of workers or owners.
Wage-earner funds are another important predecessor. Rudolf Meidner’s 1981 account examined proposals for collective capital formation linking profit-sharing and workers’ ownership. [3] Jonas Pontusson and Sarosh Kuruvilla’s 1992 study of Sweden’s implemented funds found that meeting financial objectives did not translate into substantial worker influence under the arrangements they examined. That finding concerns a particular design, not every possible fund. [4]
Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel’s democratic experimentalism develops decentralised problem-solving, shared learning and continuing evaluation. [5] Publicly supported participation likewise has established foundations: the OECD’s 2022 guidelines identify resources, accessibility and consequential use of participants’ input as elements of credible public processes. [6]
The proposed contribution is an organising obligation: essential arrangements should preserve materially supported public reconsideration during success and carry comparable capacity through succession. A collective fund need not acquire shares; participation need not end at implementation; institutional reform should not extinguish the capacity for further reform. This combination requires argument and testing, not assertions of historical priority.
Eight principles for continuing public authorship
1. Continuing authorship
Receiving benefits or approving an arrangement once should not permanently exhaust affected people’s authority. Institutions should offer workable routes to place significant questions on the agenda, obtain consideration and seek change. Continuing authorship permits decisions to stand while preserving opportunities for future reconsideration.
2. Independent capacity
People need knowledge and organisational resources that the institution under examination cannot withdraw simply because it dislikes the inquiry. Independence concerns appointments, access, funding and permissible questions. It does not exempt experts or representative bodies from scrutiny, reason-giving or replacement.
3. Proportionate funding
The resources required should reflect essentiality, dependence, concentration, existing alternatives and demonstrable gaps in current safeguards. Stronger obligations require stronger justification of expected benefits, administrative costs and distributional burdens. No universal contribution rate follows from the philosophy.
4. Revision before crisis
People should not have to wait for collapse before examining alternatives. Successful arrangements can make preparation more affordable and deliberation less desperate. Scheduled review is therefore valuable even when it recommends continuation, while credible evidence of serious harm can justify earlier examination.
5. Freedom to reconsider purposes
Authorship reaches the goals of an arrangement, not merely its efficiency against inherited targets. A public should be able to ask whether a service prioritises access, speed, resilience or affordability appropriately. Replacing a supplier while preserving unquestioned objectives may leave the central political decision untouched.
6. Continuity through transition
Authority to change an essential system carries responsibility towards those dependent on it. Retained knowledge, documentation, trained staff, staged implementation and fallback arrangements can preserve practical choice. Transition costs and acceptable risks should be explicit, with special attention to vulnerable users.
7. Successor obligations
Public ownership, a cooperative conversion or a new democratic constitution does not complete public authorship forever. A successor should preserve comparable opportunities and capabilities for further reconsideration. What survives is the public function, not necessarily the existing organisation, funding instrument or office-holders.
8. Reciprocal rights
Revision must respect minorities, individuals, workers, investors and legitimate commitments. Notice, fair procedures, privacy, reasoned decisions and independent challenge constrain public power. These protections do not freeze every settlement, and they do not give every affected person an unlimited veto.
Who constitutes the affected public?
An affected public comprises people substantially exposed to an arrangement’s decisions, dependencies and consequences. Workers, users, neighbouring communities and people affected across borders can possess different claims. Non-users may bear pollution or exclusion. Future generations need representation through defensible trusteeship and attention to durable consequences.
Neither citizenship alone nor any asserted effect settles representation. I would consider severity, duration, dependence, available alternatives, contribution and vulnerability. These are reasons for judgment, not validated numerical weights. A resident facing essential-service exclusion has a different claim from a distant observer expressing a general preference.
Standing should distinguish access to information, consultation, funded participation, representation, decision-making and challenge. Different powers can legitimately belong to different institutions. Elections, worker representation, open nominations and appropriately designed civic lotteries could complement one another. Selection rules, mandates and routes to replace representatives should be public.
Minority protections should constrain what majorities may impose. Participants need accessible explanations, compensation where justified, translation and realistic opportunities to dissent. Relevant financial, professional and political interests should be disclosed and managed. Expertise should inform decisions without becoming an exclusive licence to determine public purposes.
The Reauthorial Dividend: financing capacity rather than acquiescence
The Reauthorial Dividend is a proposed contribution towards independent public expertise, participation, evaluation and transition capacity. It is not necessarily a cash payment. Income support and profit-sharing may improve security and bargaining power, but their purposes differ from financing people’s capacity to examine and revise essential arrangements.
Eligible expenditure could include independent technical advice, usable operational information, participation support, evaluation of alternatives and limited transition preparation. It should not become unrestricted spending on any project described as public empowerment. Budgets should identify tasks, beneficiaries, expected uses and review conditions.
Possible instruments include a disclosed concession contribution, public appropriation, protected endowment or pooled sector arrangement. Each would require lawful implementation and context-specific justification. Funding should not depend entirely on profits: an essential institution making little surplus can still create serious dependence. Existing independent capacity may also make a new fund unnecessary.
Funding incidence must be examined. A charge nominally imposed on an operator might affect returns, wages, investment, bills or public budgets. Calling it a dividend does not establish who ultimately pays. Low-income households should not quietly finance a professional revision establishment that they cannot access.
The administrator needs transparent appointments, plural representation, published allocation criteria, managed conflicts, independent audit and usable appeals. Evaluation should examine who obtained support and whether excluded people gained practical capacity. Raw expenditure and meeting counts are insufficient. Protected funding should coexist with reviewable budgets and procedures for replacing the body itself.
A concrete predecessor illustrates why resources matter. German works-council law provides employer-funded operating support and treats expert advice as necessary when a council must assess AI within its statutory tasks, subject to the law’s conditions. This is a specific participation architecture, not a universal Reauthorist entitlement. [7]
The Successor Duty and the right to reconsider the duty
The Successor Duty would preserve relevant knowledge, information access, participation arrangements, independent resources and transition capability through institutional transformation. These requirements should be clear enough for prospective owners and governing bodies to assess before taking responsibility. A change of legal form should not silently erase public capacity.
The same standard applies to private, public, cooperative, employee-owned and other democratically governed successors. Each can distribute authority well or badly. A publicly owned service may remain remote from citizens; a cooperative may exclude affected non-members. Ownership influences governance without conclusively establishing public authorship.
The hardest objection is self-reference: would permanently binding future publics to Reauthorism contradict authorship? I reject an unamendable monopoly for the framework or its administrators. Future publics should be able to revise its mechanisms and principles through informed, inclusive procedures. An incumbent’s unilateral abolition of revision rights, however, is not equivalent to such reconsideration.
Oversight need not become an endless hierarchy. Representative authorities, independent audit, appropriate legal review and public challenge can perform bounded, distinguishable functions. Replacement procedures should preserve essential records and capability while permitting the revision body to disappear or change. Continuity protects the public function, not a permanent class of reauthors.
International partnerships: capacity beyond national discretion
Geoeconomic power makes the difference between access and authorship especially important. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s analysis of weaponized interdependence identifies how asymmetrical economic networks can give states opportunities for coercion. It does not imply that every dependency is deliberately engineered or every partnership coercive. [8]
Hypothetical application: two countries finance and operate a cross-border water system with a foreign technology supplier. Reliable supply and affordable finance are substantial benefits. Reauthorism would also ask whether local institutions, workers and affected communities can understand operations, evaluate investment priorities and participate in lawful reconsideration of the partnership’s next stage.
Technical training, necessary information access, independent evaluation and proportionate transition provisions could support that capacity. Citizens and downstream communities need meaningful representation; strengthening a government’s bargaining discretion alone may simply strengthen governing elites. Creditors’ rights, intellectual property and legitimate contracts remain relevant constraints.
This proposal does not require autarky or perpetual renegotiation. The 2017 PPP Reference Guide already addresses contract management, expiry and asset handover. [9] Reauthorism adds a normative question to established capacity-building practices: do the people exposed to the arrangement retain supported authority over its future purposes?
My illustration “The Unfinished Atlas of 2026” work-in-progress. The art represents that technological progress and global economic power must leave people with the knowledge, tools and authority to keep rewriting their shared future.
Procurement: preserving the next public decision
Continue the hypothetical water system. Its municipal authorities procure a digital platform for customer requests and billing. A contract can preserve the ability to change suppliers while leaving the service’s policy objectives fixed. Public authorship requires the ability to question those objectives as well.
The purchaser should retain enough expertise to evaluate alternatives and seek usable documentation, proportionate interoperability, data portability, audit access and transition assistance. Licensing should permit the agreed public functions and future transitions without assuming that open-source software or public ownership is always necessary.
Requirements should be disclosed early and scaled to risks. Sensitive information can be examined through protected access where justified; unnecessary disclosure can harm security and legitimate commercial interests. Smaller suppliers should not face bespoke compliance machinery where standard evidence would suffice. Operational knowledge must remain usable beyond the original procurement team.
AI: sharing gains and retaining authority over purposes
The technological context strengthens the case for examining material capability. UNCTAD’s Technology and Innovation Report 2025 identifies infrastructure, data and skills as central leverage points for inclusive AI development. Access and competence are therefore already recognised policy concerns. [10] Reauthorism asks how those capabilities connect to continuing authority.
Suppose the hypothetical water authorities introduce AI to classify service requests and draft replies. Faster responses and financial savings might benefit users and workers. But staff, vulnerable households and affected non-users may disagree about whether success should mean fewer administrative minutes, fewer unresolved repairs or better protection against hardship.
Independent evaluation should examine those choices before procurement fixes them. Participants need not become machine-learning specialists. They need trustworthy interpretation, access to relevant evidence and opportunities to question expert assumptions. The ability to produce persuasive text cannot itself establish that an operational or welfare decision is sound.
A review could retain useful assistance, change performance criteria or keep particular decisions with accountable human staff. Shared financial gains would remain valuable. They would not settle who may reconsider deployment, work redesign, service priorities or the decision not to automate an activity. More autonomous future systems should be assessed as their capabilities are demonstrated, rather than presumed inevitable.
The seven-part Reauthorism Test
The Reauthorism Test is a proposed qualitative diagnostic, not a validated index. Standing asks who may participate or challenge. Knowledge asks whether necessary information can be obtained and understood. Independent resources asks whether investigation and organisation depend on discretionary incumbent permission.
Authority over purposes examines whether goals can be reconsidered, rather than only implementation. Transition capacity examines whether change is practically possible without unacceptable disruption. Rights protection examines safeguards for individuals, minorities and legitimate commitments. Successor obligations asks whether comparable revision capacity will survive transformation.
Assessment should combine documents, interviews and observed practice, reporting supported capacity, documented constraints and unresolved evidence. A missing document is not proof that a safeguard is absent. Nor does a charter establish that a safeguard works. There are no validated numerical weights or universal pass marks. Deliberate continuation can indicate authorship as readily as restructuring.
Investment, stability and the possibility of doing too much
The strongest economic objection concerns expectations. A successful institution required to finance its possible revision may face lower returns, increased uncertainty and politicised pressure. Dixit and Pindyck’s work on irreversible investment explains why uncertainty can make waiting valuable; it does not establish the size of any Reauthorist effect. [11]
Maintaining capacity and actually restructuring are distinct costs, but neither disappears through that distinction. Expertise consumes resources; transition can disrupt service. Published review intervals, defined powers, reasonable notice, staged implementation and protection of legitimate commitments can improve predictability. They cannot guarantee that every burden is worthwhile.
I would reject intervention where no significant capacity gap is demonstrated, costs are disproportionate, rights are insufficiently protected or a revision fund primarily benefits its administrators. An optional competitive service with easy alternatives should not carry the same obligations as a difficult-to-replace essential network. Existing governance may already provide adequate safeguards.
Where problems exist, shared expertise, improved disclosure or stronger existing representation may be cheaper than a new body. Deferral can be justified by unresolved continuity risks, provided it specifies preparation and a review date. Incumbents and proposed reformers should face comparable demands for evidence, reasons and accountability.
Relationship to the wider economics programme
The published definition of Sovereign Capability Economics evaluates prosperity through practical capacities such as ownership, knowledge, choice and exit. Sovereignty Friction Theory examines barriers between formal economic rights and their practical exercise. Constructive Counter-Economics concerns lawful, peaceful and voluntary alternatives to concentrated dependence.
Reauthorism shares their concern with usable agency but centres on continuing authority to revise essential arrangements, including when exit is difficult or undesirable. Alternatives can strengthen that authority; they do not replace it. PoliticalEconomics.com could provide a platform for related policy and geopolitical analysis. That possibility establishes no historical claim about this philosophy.
A research agenda open to correction
Three kinds of work must remain distinct. The normative argument must explain why dependence supports claims to authorship, how those claims interact with property and democratic authority, and what future publics may revise. The institutional proposals must specify representation, funding, legal powers, accountability and continuity arrangements. Neither task alone proves beneficial outcomes.
Empirical research should test whether particular designs improve access to independent expertise, widen consequential participation and preserve practical alternatives without excessive costs. Independent assessors should apply explicit diagnostic guidance to the same cases, examine disagreements and revise ambiguous criteria. Agreement would establish neither moral correctness nor causal effectiveness.
Comparative and longitudinal studies could investigate participation, investment, service quality, distributional burdens and capture. Evidence of persistent exclusion, blocked inquiries, higher costs without usable authority or less costly equivalent safeguards would weaken an implementation’s case. More meetings or greater spending would not establish success.
I offer this formulation as a proposal whose mechanisms must remain answerable to those judgments. Prosperity deserves protection, and people deserve supported authority over its direction. The aim is an economy in which successful arrangements can continue because affected publics can examine and renew them—and in which those same publics remain capable of choosing another course.
Sources and related definitions
- James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, editors, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power. Cambridge University Press; print release 30 October 2009, commonly cited as 2010; online edition 5 June 2012.
- Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy. University of California Press, 1985; linked paperback edition August 1986.
- Rudolf Meidner, “Collective asset formation through wage-earner funds”. International Labour Review 120(3), 1981, pp. 303–317.
- Jonas Pontusson and Sarosh Kuruvilla, “Swedish Wage-Earner Funds: An Experiment in Economic Democracy”. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 45(4), July 1992.
- Michael C. Dorf and Charles F. Sabel, “A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism”. Columbia Law Review 98(2), March 1998.
- OECD, OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes. 24 September 2022.
- Germany, Works Constitution Act, sections 40 and 80(3). Official English translation incorporating amendments through 19 July 2024; the AI expert-advice provision followed the 2021 reform.
- Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion”. International Security 44(1), Summer 2019, pp. 42–79.
- World Bank and partner institutions, Public-Private Partnerships Reference Guide, Version 3. 2017; linked section covers the PPP cycle, including contract management and asset handover.
- UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Technology and Innovation Report 2025: Inclusive Artificial Intelligence for Development. 7 April 2025.
- Avinash K. Dixit and Robert S. Pindyck, Investment under Uncertainty. Princeton University Press, 30 January 1994.