After the Politique du Pire: Costly Commitment, Institutional Adaptation, and the Reproduction of Political Elites

Abstract

The politique du pire is a strategy of provocation in which a materially weaker actor seeks to induce a state response so excessive that the regime damages its own legitimacy. This theoretical working paper asks what may survive after an armed strategy is defeated. It does not posit organisational continuity between violent groups and later democratic parties. It advances a narrower mechanism: under a changed selection environment, cultural packages may abandon violence while retaining antagonistic boundaries, heroic genealogies, costly displays of commitment, and institutions that reproduce reliable bearers. The paper bridges Gramsci's war of position, Laclau and Mouffe's construction of political frontiers, costly-signalling theory, and an extended-phenotype approach to legal and political institutions. It distinguishes Fisherian runaway from handicap signalling and develops a multilevel evolutionary-game framework with predictions against ordinary patronage, professionalisation, bureaucratic inertia, spontaneous ideological convergence, and performance-based persistence. Argentina and Spain are framed as research programmes rather than established cases. This paper is theoretical and hypothesis-generating. It reports no new empirical dataset, causal estimate, calibrated game, or validated measurement instrument. The manuscript includes a disclosure of substantial generative-AI assistance in research organisation, translation, drafting, and editorial review; the author remains responsible for all claims, interpretations, citations, and conclusions.