Abstract
It is rather mundane to say it is impossible to find two identical democracies. However, what is exactly that differentiates one democracy from another? It is the particular wider societal setting-an establishment.
From the socio-legal point of view, the establishment is nothing else than a structural coupling between imaginaries of two autopoietic organisations, between the constitutional identity of the state and the popular identity of the political people; former representing the instrumental rationality (institutionalisation of power, the rule of law, separation of powers) and latter the substantive rationality (symbolic representation and integration of various social groups into the (political) people). We speak about an imaginary since there is no essential core of neither of those identities; in fact, they exist only through the manifestation of the particular decisions of the two organisations.
Those decisions are the constituting factors of the autopoietic organisation of the state and the political people, and by analysing their three basic elements-personal, procedural, and value, i.e. who makes the decisions, how they are made, and what interconnects them-we might analyse the organisation itself. Therefore, building upon Taylor's theory of social imaginaries, Luhmann's theory of autopoietic social systems, Přibáň's theory of constitutional imaginaries, and Smend's theory of integration, we might conceptualise what the particular setting of democratic constitutional state looks like, and most importantly, how it is imagined within a particular society.