The Political Architecture of Sustained Irrationality: How Institutional Design Enables Negative-Sum Decision-Making

Abstract

This paper develops an integrative theoretical framework for understanding why political institutions systematically reward decisions that produce negative-sum outcomes, a phenomenon termed institutionally enabled irrationality. The framework identifies three interacting mechanisms: consequence diffusion, through which temporal delay, spatial externalization, and narrative reframing insulate decision-makers from the costs of their choices; selection inversion, through which weakened accountability gradually favors leaders skilled in political positioning over those skilled in producing outcomes; and power amplification, through which the concentrated and often irreversible authority of political office converts individually bounded misjudgment into system-level crisis. Drawing on public choice theory, positive political theory, and historical institutionalism, the paper further challenges the widespread assumption that political systems self-correct, arguing that electoral and institutional correction mechanisms are considerably noisier and less reliable than commonly assumed. The diffusion–selection linkage is given a formal treatment grounded in the political-agency literature, and the paper concludes by proposing institutional design principles intended to strengthen consequence gradients and reduce the structural conditions under which irrationality is sustained.