Norm-Explicit Governance and Behavioral Stability Measurement: RCDD Instrument for Political Perturbation Dynamics and Determinism Without Illusion (Spinoza, Agency, Institutional Justification)

Two linked but distinct papers share a single design commitment: separating descriptive measurement from normative decision-making, and making normative parameters explicit, versioned, contestable, and enforceable. Paper 1 (RCDD-Labeled Instrument, v8.0) specifies a norm-explicit, measurement-only framework for longitudinal analysis of political candidate response dynamics under perturbation. It defines stability, drift, recovery, coupling, regime shift, settling time, hysteresis, and robustness as descriptive outputs derived from versioned feature extraction on transcripts and event metadata. It prohibits endorsements, rankings, predictions, targeting, and persuasion uses. It requires a governance lifecycle for parameter setting and revision, reliability and robustness checks, topic-shift controls, known-weakness tests, and a refuse-to-report policy when prerequisites fail. Paper 2 (Determinism Without Illusion, revised v2) argues that disputes about responsibility and legitimacy persist because institutions conflate causal necessity with epistemic predictability and then treat technical measures as moral warrants. Anchored in Spinoza’s determinism and extended with modern constraints (chaos, self-reference, computational limits, control-theoretic framing), it provides a conceptual rationale for norm-explicit governance and against normative laundering through technical thresholds. A short bridge note (Bundle_Overview_and_Scope_Map_v1.0) maps the scope boundaries between the two papers, clarifies what is newly established versus treated as background, and provides citation guidance for each component. Keywords (unchanged) AI governance AI evaluation accountability auditability risk management parameter governance norm-explicit governance refuse-to-report measurement validity construct validity reliability robustness system identification control theory stability analysis drift detection regime shift hysteresis settling time political communication debate analysis transcript analysis text-as-data political methodology ethics of measurement institutional legitimacy determinism Spinoza agency free will debate moral desert institutional justification