UQO Working Papers · WP35 · v1.0
The Social Compression Hypothesis
A Pre-Registered Test of Coordination Demand, Institutional Capacity, and Instability in Historical and Modern Societies, with a Formal Framework and Agent-Based Experiments
- Year
- 2026
- First release
- November 2026
- Latest revision
- November 2026
- Publication status
- Working paper
The compression reading of institutions is coherent and simulable; its empirical corollary fails a frozen pre-registration
Five theorems and 6,048 agent-based runs make the framework precise, but on 626 Seshat polities, 1,291 Ethnographic Atlas societies and 14,637 country-years the demand–capacity mismatch, though associated with instability (0.20 and 0.39 log-odds per SD), adds nothing identifiable to scale alone or capacity alone.
Abstract
Institutions, standards, records and administrative hierarchies can be read as devices that lower the communication cost of coordinating many people: a form of compression. This paper states that reading formally, derives what it does and does not imply, and tests its empirical corollary, that a mismatch between a society's coordination demand (population, territory, settlement structure) and its coordination capacity (administration, standardized rules and money, communication infrastructure, record-keeping) predicts subsequent instability, under a frozen pre-registration.
Demand, capacity and mismatch indices are built from the Seshat Polaris-2026 databank (626 polities; 127 CrisisDB crisis records with polity-level predictors, dated facts preceding the crisis where they exist), the Ethnographic Atlas (1,291 societies) and a V-Dem–Maddison country-year panel (14,637 country-years, 901 distinct event-years, 1820–2025), with a transparent block index and a latent-variable alternative, uncertainty propagation and out-of-sample validation. Capacity and scale are positively associated in all three datasets. The mismatch index is positively associated with crisis severity in Seshat (0.20 log-odds per SD, stable across regions, eras and cultural spheres) and with instability onsets in modern states (0.39 per SD), but by the pre-registered criterion it fails: it does not beat the scale-only baseline out of sample in Seshat, nor the capacity-only baseline in the modern panel; the restriction it imposes on scale and capacity is rejected in the modern panel; a placebo index is not distinguishable from it in Seshat; the modern association is nearly as strong with past as with future events; and it is not robust to an Oster-type adjustment. No threshold is found in Seshat and only a small nonlinearity in the modern panel. Among Seshat polities with a crisis record, higher capacity is also associated with a shorter polity duration, against the hypothesis.
Five theorems make the compression reading precise (coding gain, break-even scale, stale-code penalty, hierarchical routing, backlog dynamics), and factorial agent-based experiments (6,048 runs, five imposed institutional regimes, equal administrative budgets) instantiate them in silico on the cost side, bits, messages, queues, while locating the regimes where institutions hurt: unpaid set-up costs, saturated hierarchies, and weakly structured task environments. The conclusion is that the compression framework is coherent and simulable, that scale and capacity each matter, but that their mismatch, as measurable in existing historical data, carries no identifiable predictive content of its own. The universal theory is not supported; the narrower results are stated with their scope.
Key findings
626 / 1,291 / 14,637
Seshat polities, Ethnographic Atlas societies, V-Dem–Maddison country-years (1820–2025)
0.20 log-odds / SD
mismatch index on crisis severity in Seshat, stable across regions, eras and cultural spheres
0.39 / SD
mismatch index on instability onsets in modern states
Fails
pre-registered criterion: no out-of-sample gain over scale-only (Seshat) or capacity-only (modern) baselines
5
theorems: coding gain, break-even scale, stale-code penalty, hierarchical routing, backlog dynamics
6,048
factorial agent-based runs under five institutional regimes with equal administrative budgets
Scientific contributions
- A formal statement of institutions as compression
- Shared codes, records and routing structures that lower the communication cost per coordinated task, with five provable properties and an explicit account of what the reading does not imply.
- A pre-registered empirical test that fails honestly
- The mismatch index is associated with instability in the predicted direction but does not beat scale-only or capacity-only baselines out of sample, is matched by a placebo, loads as strongly on past as on future events and does not survive an Oster-type adjustment; the universal framing is rejected under the rule committed to in advance.
- A measurement model for Seshat
- Presence codes treated as missing where missing, with ranges, dates and latent-score uncertainty carried through to inference, and a transparent block index beside a latent-variable alternative.
- Agent-based testbed of the mechanisms
- Factorial experiments measure bits, messages and queues under five regimes and locate where institutions hurt: unpaid set-up costs, saturated hierarchies and weakly structured task environments.
- What the data cannot answer
- Scale and capacity are so tightly coupled that their difference carries one sixth of their joint variance; utilization, reach and administrative load are not coded in any existing databank, which defines the next credible test.
Methodology
Methodology (5)
Frozen pre-registration
Hypotheses, indices, baselines and decision criteria committed before estimation; results reported against those criteria, with the universal and the narrower readings separated.
Index construction with uncertainty
Transparent block indices for demand and capacity and a latent-variable alternative, with uncertainty propagation and out-of-sample validation.
Baselines, placebos and robustness
Scale-only and capacity-only baselines, placebo indices, lead–lag symmetry checks on past versus future events, Oster-type adjustment, threshold and nonlinearity tests, and polity-duration analysis.
Formal framework
Five theorems on coding gain, break-even scale, stale-code penalty, hierarchical routing and backlog dynamics, each with proof.
Factorial agent-based experiments
6,048 runs across five imposed institutional regimes with equal administrative budgets, measuring the cost side (bits, messages, queues) of coordination.
Research data
- Seshat Polaris-2026 databank
- 626 polities and 127 CrisisDB crisis records with polity-level predictors; dated facts preceding each crisis used where they exist; presence codes handled as missing when missing.
- Ethnographic Atlas
- 1,291 societies used to test the association between coordination capacity and scale in a cross-section of ethnographically described societies.
- V-Dem–Maddison country-year panel
- 14,637 country-years with 901 distinct event-years over 1820–2025, combining institutional capacity measures with population and income to test instability onsets.
Reproducibility
- Replication package reproduces every number from the raw downloads with one command (Makefile, pyproject, configs)
- Pre-registration and measurement model for Seshat released, with a validated bibliography and novelty matrix for the converging literatures
- Agent-based testbed released with the factorial design and regime definitions
- Full LaTeX source of the 80-page paper
Research artifacts
Version history
| Version | Date | Description | File |
|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0current | November 2026 | Current manuscript as published on www.spboucher.ai (revised edition after the 2026-10-17 scientific review for papers 1–17). | PDF · 80 p. |