Authority Capacity: Insulation, Capitalisation, and the Preconditions of Institutional Judgment

Roshan Ghadamian
Additional contact information
Roshan Ghadamian: Institute for Regenerative Systems Architecture

IRSA Working Papers from Institute for Regenerative Systems Architecture

Abstract: Institutions are routinely described as having authority or lacking it, as though authority were a status conferred by mandate and retained until revoked. That description cannot account for the most common observed failure: an institution that unambiguously holds authority, and does not exercise it. This paper defines authority capacity — the structural ability to exercise judgement under pressure without decision authority being displaced by external or anticipatory constraint — and argues it is a finite stock rather than a status. It depletes under repeated pressure, distorts behaviour as it becomes scarce, and does not restore itself. Two structural conditions determine it. Insulation — arrangements that delay, dampen or transform the transmission of external pressure into the decisional core — and capitalisation, which sets whether an institution can absorb the cost of a contested decision at all. ⭠Because capitalisation conditions capacity, capital design is constitutionally prior to governance design: better rules, clearer values, stronger leadership and crisis toolkits all fail where capacity is structurally starved. The paper closes by reframing substitution — capital, liability, process or moral framing coming to function as de facto decision authority — as the symptom of authority scarcity rather than its cause. That distinction matters for anything built on it: a regularity observed over substitution predicts the surface, not the mechanism.

Keywords: authority capacity; institutional judgment; insulation; capitalisation; authority substitution; institutional design; decision authority; depletion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D23 D73 H11 L22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:evk:wpaper:acij

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IRSA Working Papers from Institute for Regenerative Systems Architecture
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roshan Ghadamian ().