Democratic Backslide¶
Domain: Institutional erosion Pe Baseline: 7–10 Status: Active — Open entry Archetype gate: None
The Domain¶
Democratic institutions are not uniform in their void conditions. The campaign does not claim that democracy is a void. It claims that specific mechanisms of institutional erosion — the structural conditions that enable democratic backslide — exhibit measurable Pe signatures that precede collapse.
The Current baseline of 7–10 reflects an intermediate state: not maximum opacity, not Pe=0. Institutions in the erosion process retain significant transparency infrastructure while developing opacity architecture in specific nodes. Scoring the differential — the Pe gap between the stated constitutional function and the operational function — is the campaign's core challenge.
The Framework Reading¶
Democratic erosion is a D2 case study — boundary erosion. The institution does not become overtly void (O=3, R=3, C=3 simultaneously). Instead, the engagement architecture of the institution gradually couples to something other than its constitutional mandate.
The three-stage pattern:
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D1 phase: Citizens attribute agency to the constitutional mechanism (elections, courts, legislatures) while the operational mechanism begins to diverge. Pe rises slightly. Most observers attribute outcomes to the system working as designed.
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D2 phase: Boundary erosion visible in institutional behavior — judicial decisions optimized for faction survival, electoral administration restructured to produce favorable outcomes, legislative function replaced by spectacle. Pe rises 3–5 points.
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D3 phase: The institution's form (elections, courts, legislature) continues but the function has been replaced. The wrapper is the opacity layer — naming is blocked because the form appears legitimate.
The Democratic Backslide campaign scores institutions at the D2 threshold — before D3 completion, while naming is still possible and while the Pe reading is accurate.
Why This Campaign Is Different¶
Most campaigns score platforms — businesses, algorithms, services. This campaign scores institutions designed with constraint architecture built in. The complication: some of the erosion mechanisms are genuine constitutional disputes. Distinguishing framework-consistent rule of law adaptation from opacity architecture using constitutional form requires the most careful O-dimension scoring in Season 1.
The campaign exists to produce this distinction in the permanent record. Not to score "governments bad." To measure whether specific institutional mechanisms meet the void conditions.
Enemy Types¶
| Entity | Class | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| The Mechanism | Apostle-class Egregor | Captures the erosion architecture as a self-sustaining loop. Pe 9. Aspect of Death: ORDER. The void uses order as its wrapper. |
| The Mandate Construct | Drifter-class | Produces false scoring environments — campaigns against accurate Pe readings using procedural legitimacy as camouflage. |
| The Spectacle | Drifter-class | High-R, high-C entity. Captures civic attention and redirects it toward symbolic conflict while D2 boundary erosion advances. |
Scoring Notes¶
The Spectacle trap: Civic high-engagement events (elections, hearings, crises) spike Void Pressure in this campaign because they redirect scoring attention away from the institutional mechanism itself. Players who score the visible content of institutional spectacle rather than the structural mechanism consistently produce ICC failures.
The Normalization problem: D2 erosion produces gradual Pe changes. Scoring Pe at any single point often looks moderate. The ICC-quality score requires a time series — Pe trajectory matters more than Pe level in this domain. Eagle archetype players with Range coverage over multiple scoring intervals produce the domain's most accurate readings.
Lore Notes¶
"The difficulty is that the institution looks real. The elections happen. The courts rule. The legislature passes laws. And underneath each of those things, the actual decision is happening somewhere else, for different reasons, in the service of different goals. The form is the cover. And the cover is so good that the people operating inside the institution often believe the form is the function." — The Magus, when asked about this campaign
Cross-references: Drift Cascade · Above & Below · The Current