Institutions often expand what people can do. They coordinate activity, accumulate knowledge, establish infrastructure, reduce uncertainty, and make increasingly sophisticated forms of cooperation possible.
But these achievements can have consequences beyond their intended purposes. Investments become difficult to reverse. Expertise becomes concentrated. Participants acquire dependencies. Organizational routines become entrenched. Institutions that were created to solve particular problems can acquire growing influence over which alternatives remain feasible.
This suggests a hypothesis:
An institution’s success at expanding present capabilities can, under certain conditions, diminish society’s independent capacity to revise, replace, or transcend the arrangements through which those capabilities are provided.
The hypothesis belongs to the program’s three concepts; the archive’s intellectual debts are on the lineage page. It is not that institutional success necessarily produces domination, or that dependence is inherently objectionable. Complex societies depend on shared infrastructure, specialized expertise, durable commitments, and coordinated institutions. The relevant question is whether these arrangements preserve effective possibilities for their own transformation.
The literature provides substantial evidence for several mechanisms through which these possibilities can narrow. It provides less evidence for treating those mechanisms as one general developmental process. That distinction matters. The framework should identify something the evidence might establish or disconfirm, rather than redescribe every durable institution as an instance of foreclosure.
1. Path dependence: how useful arrangements become difficult to replace
Research in economic history and institutional economics establishes that the relative attractiveness of an arrangement can change as people invest in it.
W. Brian Arthur’s 1989 model of competing technologies and increasing returns shows how early adoption can generate cumulative advantages, sometimes producing outcomes that are difficult to reverse and not necessarily efficient.
Paul Pierson’s 2000 analysis of path dependence in politics extends this reasoning to political institutions. Policies and institutional arrangements generate incentives, expectations, and constituencies that shape subsequent possibilities.
Gregory Unruh’s 2000 account of carbon lock-in provides an important substantive application: fossil-fuel technologies, infrastructure, industries, and governing institutions can develop together, reinforcing barriers to alternative energy systems.
These works support a common proposition: the costs of changing an arrangement are partly produced by the history of successfully operating within it. That is different from simply claiming that incumbents resist change. Even without deliberate resistance, cumulative investments can make alternatives harder to develop and adopt.
Qualification. Paul David’s famous 1985 QWERTY argument remains contested. Liebowitz and Margolis challenged the claim that QWERTY represents the persistence of an inferior keyboard in The Fable of the Keys (1990). The mechanisms of increasing returns should not be confused with proof that a particular dominant standard is inefficient.
What remains unproven: that technological lock-in necessarily produces a corresponding loss of democratic or collective authority. High switching costs may constrain alternatives without determining who has the power to change them.
2. Organizational success: how competence can narrow adaptation
Organizational research identifies a different mechanism: success can influence what institutions learn to do next.
Daniel Levinthal and James March’s The Myopia of Learning (1993) examines how organizations become increasingly proficient in familiar activities while underinvesting in exploration. Their account includes traps of distinctive competence and power: strengths developed through repeated success can undermine adaptability under changing conditions.
Historical institutionalists identify related processes in political and economic arrangements. Kathleen Thelen’s How Institutions Evolve (2004) and Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen’s Beyond Continuity (2005) demonstrate that institutional change need not involve wholesale replacement. It may occur through gradual reinterpretation, layering, displacement, or conversion.
Jacob Hacker’s 2004 research on social-policy retrenchment shows how formal policy continuity can coexist with substantial changes in the risks people bear.
Taken together, this literature complicates any simple distinction between institutions that survive and institutions that change. An institution may preserve its formal identity while substantially changing its functions. Equally, visible organizational reform may leave its underlying distribution of authority intact.
Qualification. Institutional persistence is not itself evidence of foreclosure. Some durable institutions remain adaptable, and some reforms reduce rather than increase people’s capacity to influence their circumstances. The empirical task is to distinguish continuity that preserves useful coordination from continuity that restricts feasible alternatives.
3. Accountability: why knowing about a problem is not the same as being able to correct it
A third literature concerns the distance between formal accountability and the effective capacity to alter institutional behavior.
Marc Galanter’s Why the “Haves” Come Out Ahead (1974) explains how repeat participants in legal systems can possess advantages unavailable to people who encounter those systems only occasionally. Formal access to the same procedures does not ensure comparable influence over outcomes or rules.
Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan’s Administrative Burden (2018) examines how learning costs, compliance costs, and psychological burdens can obstruct access to public programs and rights.
Environmental disclosure research provides a particularly useful test of the relationship between information and correction. Bae, Wilcoxen, and Popp (2010) found that simply disseminating toxic-release information was less effective at reducing health risks than government efforts to process and make that information usable. The relevant distinction is between an institution becoming more visible and affected people acquiring the practical means to change its conduct.
Yet there are important counterexamples to any categorical claim that disclosure is ineffective. The Montreal Protocol has contributed to reductions in ozone-depleting substances and continuing ozone-layer recovery, according to the 2022 scientific assessment coordinated through WMO and UNEP. The global phaseout of leaded petrol was completed in 2021 through scientific work, organized advocacy, government action, and industrial transition, as documented by UNEP.
These cases suggest that information can contribute to structural correction when connected to organization, resources, enforceable authority, and feasible alternatives. Transparency is therefore neither sufficient nor irrelevant. Its significance depends on what people and institutions can do with what becomes known.
4. Platforms: when innovation changes the conditions of future competition
Platform economics is especially relevant because contemporary digital systems often function simultaneously as products, markets, and infrastructure.
Michael Katz and Carl Shapiro’s 1985 work on network externalities and compatibility establishes how the value of a system can depend on the number of other participants using compatible systems. This creates an important distinction between a platform’s contribution to coordination and its control over participation.
A platform may generate substantial social value while making independent activity increasingly dependent on continued access to its interfaces, data, standards, or distribution channels.
Ron Adner and Rahul Kapoor’s research on innovation ecosystems further demonstrates why the substitution of technologies depends on the surrounding systems of complementary technologies and activities. Competition between individual products cannot be understood independently of their ecosystems.
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act provides an ongoing test of whether institutional rules can reopen such systems. In its 2026 review, the European Commission reported increased opportunities for alternative browsers, app stores, interoperability, and data portability.
However, Püplichhuisen and Sirries (2026), studying changes in online product-search visibility, identify the possibility that a platform’s compliance with one requirement may coexist with design choices that preserve advantages elsewhere. The evidence is mixed and still developing. Regulatory changes have created measurable openings, but their longer-term effects on competition and independent innovation remain unsettled.
The framework’s question is not whether platforms should exist. It is whether their success enlarges or contracts the feasible range of independent development beyond the purposes their operators presently favor.
5. Recursive correction: who can change the rules for changing the rules?
Research on institutional governance offers resources for thinking about correction at more than one level.
Elinor Ostrom’s work on collective resource governance identifies arrangements in which participants can help modify the operational rules governing their common activities. Her approach challenges the assumption that governance must take the form of either centralized state direction or unrestricted private control.
Constitutional transitions provide a more demanding set of examples. South Africa’s 1996 constitution-making process incorporated a Constitutional Assembly, extensive public participation, higher-order constitutional principles, and judicial certification. The Constitutional Court initially withheld certification of the draft, prompting revisions before the amended constitution was approved. The Constitutional Court’s account documents this process.
Chile’s 2022 constitutional proposal illustrates a different outcome: a constitutional convention produced a proposed replacement text, which voters rejected by approximately 61.9% to 38.1%, according to the Chilean National Congress Library.
These cases establish that higher-order rules can be contested and revised, and that the results of such processes cannot be presumed. They do not establish that every affected person possesses equivalent practical authority over constitutional arrangements.
A further qualification comes from disability studies. Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim (2017) examines how political power organizes debility, capacity, and disability. Marta Russell’s Capitalism and Disability (2019) investigates the relationship between disability and capitalist economic organization. These works complicate any account that treats the expansion of productive capability as an unqualified good.
The question is not only whether institutions increase people’s capabilities. It is also who determines which capabilities count, who bears the costs of producing them, and whether standing and security become conditional on conforming to an institution’s preferred model of capacity. This is a theoretical and normative extension of the framework, not a directly established causal finding about institutional correction.
6. Second-order consequences: when assistance changes the problem it addresses
Development research demonstrates why the success of an intervention must be evaluated against outcomes beyond its immediate delivery.
Banerjee, Karlan, and Zinman’s synthesis of six randomized microcredit evaluations (2015) found generally modest positive effects rather than transformative improvements.
A randomized evaluation of the One Laptop per Child program in Peru, reported by Cristia and colleagues, found substantial increases in computer access and use without corresponding improvements in mathematics or language test scores during the study period, although some measures of general cognitive ability improved.
These cases expose the limits of using inputs or technical access as proxies for developmental progress. They do not establish that the interventions failed because their recipients lacked institutional authority. That would require separate evidence.
The larger research question concerns the long-term consequences of successful adaptation: whether interventions expand independent capabilities, reproduce existing dependencies, displace other possibilities, or change the expectations people must satisfy.
Ecological work such as C. S. Holling’s Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems (1973) offers conceptual analogies concerning resilience and systems under changing conditions. Those analogies are useful for constructing hypotheses, but they are not empirical demonstrations that social institutions behave like ecological systems.
7. Innovation and value capture: who benefits from the persistence of an arrangement?
The economics of innovation makes a distinction that matters throughout this framework.
David Teece’s Profiting from Technological Innovation (1986) explains why the actors who develop innovations are not necessarily those who capture their economic returns. The distribution of rewards depends partly on appropriability, complementary assets, and market structure.
The distinction between value creation and value capture raises a further question: can an organization become more profitable or strategically indispensable without becoming proportionately more valuable to society? The answer is potentially yes, but that result must be established through counterfactual analysis rather than inferred from profitability or market concentration alone.
Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State (2013) provides a broader historical argument about the public sector’s role in financing and shaping innovation. Its interpretation of the relative contributions of public and private actors remains a subject for empirical and political debate.
This creates room for a political economy that neither dismisses private innovators nor assumes that innovation automatically legitimizes exclusive control over its subsequent development. Private enterprises, public institutions, cooperatives, and commons-based projects can all create capabilities. Each can also generate dependencies or governance failures. The relevant comparison concerns their actual effects on value creation, distribution, independent capability, and the practical authority to pursue alternatives.
8. Public power and institutional alternatives
The research therefore does not require choosing permanently between markets and planning, private and public provision, or centralized and decentralized expertise. Different arrangements may be appropriate for different activities.
Public options, interoperability rules, common infrastructure, institutional checks, and participatory governance offer possible ways to preserve alternatives without eliminating specialization or coordination. But their presence should not be treated as sufficient evidence that authority has been redistributed.
A public option may exist without being adequately funded. An interoperability right may exist without affordable switching. A consultation process may exist without binding influence. A formally decentralized system may remain dependent on centralized finance, technical infrastructure, or expertise. Each proposed reform must therefore be evaluated in terms of its effective operation.
The framework’s positive hypothesis is that institutions can be designed so their ordinary successes strengthen the independent knowledge, material resources, organizational capacities, and decision-making authority through which they may later be contested or superseded. This remains a proposition for institutional design and empirical investigation, not an established law.
What would test the framework?
A strong test requires more than finding instances of lock-in or successful reform. It requires comparing arrangements that perform similar functions while differing in how they distribute dependence and corrective authority.
Three research designs are particularly promising.
Comparative institutional studies
Compare jurisdictions or systems using similar technologies but operating under different rules governing portability, interoperability, public provision, ownership, and participation. Measure not only adoption, efficiency, and service quality, but also the cost of creating or adopting alternatives.
Longitudinal studies of institutional success
Follow organizations as their technical, financial, or administrative capabilities increase. Examine whether these gains are accompanied by changes in independent expertise, exit feasibility, concentration of decision-making authority, resource allocation, and the ability of affected groups to secure substantive revisions. The key empirical question is whether organizational success predicts a narrowing of external options—and under what institutional conditions that relationship reverses.
Studies of contested correction
Identify cases where affected people exposed an institutional failure, demanded a change, and encountered an explicit decision process. Distinguish correction of a particular decision from revision of operational rules, redistribution of resources, or changes to the institution’s purposes and governance. Measure what changed in practice, who acquired effective authority, and whether the change persisted.
A useful set of indicators would include:
- Independent capability: the availability of expertise, infrastructure, and resources outside the incumbent institution.
- Switching and replacement costs: the practical difficulty of adopting or developing an alternative.
- Developmental optionality: the range and feasibility of credible alternative arrangements, not merely their formal availability.
- Correction depth: whether affected people can change outcomes, governing rules, resource distributions, and higher-order procedures.
- Distribution of authority: who can initiate, finance, decide upon, and enforce institutional changes.
- Counterfactual social value: the benefits and costs of the incumbent arrangement relative to feasible alternatives.
- Temporal durability: whether newly established alternatives and corrective rights remain viable over time.
These indicators would need operational definitions adapted to each domain. No single measure can establish collective self-government or developmental freedom.
What would challenge the hypothesis?
The strongest challenges would include institutions that become more successful while expanding independent alternatives; highly concentrated systems that remain substantively corrigible; decentralized systems that nevertheless restrict transformation; and cases where replacement destroys valuable coordination without producing greater effective authority.
Another challenge arises when alternatives are theoretically imaginable but prohibitively costly, environmentally damaging, or incompatible with legitimate commitments to others. Preserving the capacity for transformation does not mean that every possible transformation should be undertaken. Nor does rejecting an established arrangement necessarily constitute progress.
The framework must therefore distinguish the value of having an effective choice from the value of exercising it, and the social benefits of coordination from the political risks of allowing present coordinators to determine the future indefinitely.
Conclusion
Established research supports several mechanisms through which successful institutions can generate path dependence, concentrated expertise, durable dependencies, and unequal capacities for correction. It also documents cases in which public action, organized contestation, technological substitution, and institutional reform have altered arrangements that once appeared entrenched.
What remains insufficiently established is whether these mechanisms regularly combine into a general process in which institutional success appropriates society’s future developmental capacity. That is the central hypothesis requiring investigation.
The framework’s contribution is therefore not the discovery that institutions resist change. It is the proposed evaluative distinction between expanding capabilities through an institution and expanding society’s effective authority over the future of that institution. A successful institution may accomplish both. It may accomplish only the first. In some circumstances, it may achieve the first at the expense of the second.
Determining which outcome occurs requires comparative evidence, explicit counterfactuals, attention to distribution, and a willingness to recognize cases where durable institutions remain adaptable or replacement makes people worse off.
The political ambition is not to abolish institutions or deny their achievements. It is to understand the conditions under which institutions can become extraordinarily capable without acquiring permanent authority over what society is permitted to become.
Verification notes
Three bibliographic and interpretive corrections are particularly important before publication.
- QWERTY should not be called the strongest validating case. The existence of the original lock-in argument is verified, but the empirical claim of QWERTY’s inferiority has a substantial published challenge. Carbon lock-in is a more appropriate substantive example, although Unruh’s account is primarily a conceptual explanation rather than a definitive causal test.
- The Digital Markets Act should be treated as an ongoing experiment, not a settled success or failure. Both emerging competitive openings and possible circumvention have been documented.
- The original source list contains an authorship omission: The Public Option (2019) was coauthored by Anne L. Alstott and Ganesh Sitaraman, not Sitaraman alone. Its contribution is primarily an institutional and policy argument, not an experimental demonstration.
This essay uses a selected set of verified references rather than claiming that every citation in the inventory has been individually audited. Its central distinction is deliberate: the literature establishes important constituent mechanisms; the proposed relationship between institutional success and society’s future authority remains a research program whose empirical validity must be tested.