1. Democratic establishment reflects the two fundamental elements of any democracy—republican (liberal) principle of restraining the power by the rule of law and democratic principle of popular rule—but it is not democracy itself. Democracy has to be understood as a (relatively) stable and long-term arrangement of the organisation of the society, its basic institutional and procedural framework, and the fundamental common values on which society is built. Establishment, on the other hand, is a particular setting of democracy; it is what distinguishes one democracy from another and creates the polity within it.
2. As the establishment is, in fact, a contextualisation of democracy within a particular time and space, it is defined by those two fundamental principles of democracy (liberal and popular); the former being encapsulated by the constitutional identity of the state as it is the constitutional nature of the state that restrain the power in a democracy, latter by the popular identity of the political people as it is the political people—polity—that exercises the popular rule in a democracy.
3. Following Luhmann’s social systems theory, both the state and the political people are considered autopoietic organisational systems to capture their nature as phenomena manifesting themselves only in moments of their decisions and operating within multiple function systems.
4. An autopoietic organisational system exists as long as it distinguishes itself from its environment. This distinction might be called identity if such is understood as a never-ending process of collective imaginary and not as a preëxisting quality. Therefore, I examine the constitutional identity of the state organisational system and the popular identity of the political people organisational system as those two identities encapsulate the nature of those two organisational systems.
5. The only way to examine the identity of an organisational system is through its decisions (communication of the organisational system) as they are the articulation of the collective imaginary; that is, it is not possible to examine the collective imaginary directly as it is only an inner process of the membership of the organisational system.
6. When examining the decisions of an organisational system, I am interested in 1) who makes them, 2) how is the decision-making process regulated, and 3) what connects individual decisions together. Here, Smend’s integrative theory offers a useful conceptual framework of, what I call, an integrative triad of personal elements, procedural elements, and value elements, which all together create the organisational structure of the organisational system enabling not only decision-making but also its future continuation.
7. The personal elements are those who articulate the collective imaginary of the membership of an organisational system as such, is not able to articulate it on its own in its totality. In other words, the personal elements are representatives of the organisation’s membership that concretise the collective imaginary of the membership by its articulation.
8. The procedural elements are the (not necessarily legal) regulation of the decision-making process that ensures the decisions are going to be made in the future. It is the formation of the organisational structure into patterns enabling a schematic repetitiveness of the decision-making.
9. The value elements, on the one hand, create the representative link between the organisation’s membership and the personal elements, and on the other, constitutes the connectivity of particular decisions by selecting which decisions are going to be part of the series of decisions and which not, and by interpreting those decisions included, so they fit into the series. In other words, value elements create connectivity by means of social memory and social forgetting.
10. The decisions of the state organisational system are:

• a. law—no matter whether primary or secondary legislation, no matter whether issued by parliament, central or regional government, whether written or unwritten (e.g. constitution, law decree, ministerial regulation);
• b. judicial decision (e.g. constitutional court judgement);
• c. other decisions of various constitutional bodies, officials, and authorities no matter their form or (legal) nature (e.g. president’s decision to name a prime minister, the decision of a central bank to regulate mortgages, the government’s decision to organise a nationwide celebration of an important anniversary);
• d. administrative decisions (e.g. expropriation decision, building permit).

11.The decisions of the political people organisational system are:

• a. electoral decisions and referenda;
• b. mass demonstrations, general strikes, and revolutions;
• c. public holidays celebrations (e.g. Bastille Day in France, Day of the Republic in Italy);
• d. cultural-product appropriations (e.g. U.S. Constitution understood by the People as a cultural product articulating its identity).