Testing the axis conventional indices miss.
The Contributive Justice Index is tested as an orthogonal stress measurement: whether a society can look prosperous and formally democratic while losing the contributive, agency, and common-life conditions that make institutions work.
Directional validation is live. Measured-panel findings are not claimed yet.
The current validation package proves method logic, internal coherence, orthogonality, cross-validation behavior, and preregistration mechanics. It does not yet license public real-country CJI scores as findings.
Open sealed CJI commitmentsValidation Stack
The website should show the method as something under pressure: orthogonality, retrospective probes, blind-spot cross-validation, negative controls, and sealed future commitments.
Orthogonal Stress Axis
CJI is tested as a distinct stress measurement, not as a renamed GDP or formal-democracy score. The 44-country panel reports that V-Dem and prosperity together leave about one third of CJI variance unexplained.
Conversion Class Validation
The product is not only a number. The engine classifies how stress converts: capture, rupture, constraint-stress, recomposition, delayed conversion, dependency, legitimacy-stress, resilience, or monitor.
Concealed Stress Gap
The blind-spot gap asks how much stress conventional prosperity and democracy profiles would conceal. Leave-one-out cross-validation tests whether that gap survives holding countries out of the baseline.
Historical Probe Suite
Retrospective probes are used carefully: they find method limits, check ordering, test matched pairs, and expose bugs. They are not treated as the strongest predictive evidence.
Negative And Split Profiles
Denmark tests the down direction. Singapore tests whether a collapsed dimension gets hidden by an average. The method must not become a high-score machine.
Pre-Registration And Retraction
The strongest evidence comes later: sealed CJI class predictions, fixed resolution criteria, Brier scoring, and annual retraction thresholds when enough calls resolve.
Orthogonality
This is the core validation claim. CJI must carry information that formal democracy and prosperity do not already contain.
Independent CJI variance after fitting conventional formal-democracy and prosperity proxies on the directional 44-country panel.
Retrospective Tests
Retrospectives are useful when they are humble. They are used to expose bugs, test the direction of the method, and separate stress from conversion pathway, not to claim hindsight-proof predictive power.
What These Tests Do Not Prove
The public validation surface is stronger if the limits are visible.
Most tests use directional codings from the public record. Real measured validation needs source-bound country-year indicators and frozen reference panels.
Lead-lag and ordering do not prove that moral-infrastructure stress caused the later outcome. Rival drivers remain possible.
Any real-country CJI number remains a calibration artifact until connector coverage, expert coding, confidence, panel hash, and the 2027-2030 windows mature.
Pre-registration is the accountability layer. The working product today is orthogonal stress measurement plus conversion classification.
Country-Score Release Guard
No public or API surface should present a real-country CJI number as a finding unless the score carries the full measured-panel proof envelope.
The country-year score must name the exact reference panel used to transform the cohort.
The scored country payload must be reproducible from the exact input envelope.
Every emitted source-bound indicator must be present, absent with a stated reason, or expert-coded under the protocol.
The nine judgement-coded cells need citations, coder/review status, and quality.
The score must carry weakest-link confidence, not only a point number.
The public surface must state whether the score is validated, pending, directional, or only a calibration artifact.
Path To Stronger Evidence
The public story should show where validation goes next, not pretend the destination has already been reached.
Assemble measured panel
Bind every indicator to real source coverage, expert-codebook cells, confidence bands, and a frozen panel hash.
Publish validation runs
Expose the annual stress-class release, blind-spot gap, error notes, and retraction monitor without turning calibration artifacts into findings.
Resolve preregistered calls
Let sealed commitments mature against canonical events, then report Brier, recall, false positives, and retraction thresholds.