The Skeleton Infrastructure Strategy

[Artichoker]

Here's an illustration...assume the current beakers per turn are 200/turn, and the modified cost of Constitution is 3000 beakers. So without Representation, it will take 15 turns to research Constitution.

This means the Nationalism tech path gets Constitution 15 turns before the Liberalism path, assuming no bulbing past Philosophy.

If we are running 20 specialists, with an average science multiplier of 4/3, that's 60 * 4/3 = 80 extra beakers per turn, which results in 1200 extra beakers during those 15 turns--not as much as the 2000 beakers from Liberalism, but on the other hand you get to decide where to put those beakers.

Small mistake...in this case, Liberalism gives a bonus of about 2500 beakers, since Nationalism is taken as the free tech. If the free tech is taken elsewhere, however, that will further delay Constitution past the 15 turns mentioned above.

But my point stands...to maximize progress towards Constitution, the Liberalism path requires Paper-Education-Liberalism-Nationalism-Constitution. At this point, the extra tech has already been assigned. Whereas the Constitution path requires only Nationalism-Constitution, at which point the extra beakers mentioned above will be gained (and can be allocated to a tech of choice).