Endogenous Institutional Erosion: Diffuse Particularism and the Dynamics of Corrective Capacity

Why can a formally stable constitutional order become progressively harder to revise? This paper develops a theory of endogenous institutional erosion driven by the cumulative residue of distributive political activity. It generalises Olson’s account of unintended social rigidity from organised distributional coalitions to diffuse, uncoordinated particularism and asks when rigidity becomes a loss of corrective capacity. The framework separates complexity from congestive opacity and defines erosion as a persistent decline in the ability to detect, reconsider, and revise rules within bounded time and collective cost. A slow-fast model shows that positive feedback can generate a saddle-node and, under additional two-fold conditions, hysteresis. An aggregative game shows why: even when distributive transfers cancel socially and no coalition coordinates the actors, each internalises only a fraction of the congestive cost. Along the selected symmetric equilibrium, a larger actor population raises aggregate political investment and the institutional wedge, while individual action and higher-order curvature remain conditional. Modular or polycentric design, including regulatory arbitrage, may instead keep complexity adaptive. The result is a constitutional rationale for maintaining revisability rather than pursuing simplicity as such.