Anarchy as Architect: Competitive Pressure, Technology, and the Internal Structure of States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The internal institutional structures of states greatly impact their citizens’ welfare. However, states are not at complete liberty to adopt any internal form. Competitive pressure arising from anarchy limits the range of viable domestic institutions to those that do not impose a significant disadvantage. We argue that technological change can alter the relative competitiveness of different state forms and, by extension, improve or degrade human welfare. We empirically support this argument through a macrohistorical survey of competitively significant technologies. We conclude that the true costs of international anarchy are greater than commonly appreciated, as competitive pressure may force states to evolve into forms detrimental to the welfare of their inhabitants. Moreover, the adoption of state forms that improve human well-being is often driven by technological change as much as human agency. Finally, the invention of seemingly beneficial technologies may decrease human well-being by improving the competitiveness of inegalitarian state forms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".