# Legitimacy Trap

> Legitimacy Trap is mapped as the distortion: it shows how political capacities deform through scale, opacity, feedback failure, exclusion, or self-protection.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:pathologies:legitimacy-trap` |
| Family | System Pathologies |
| Domain | Power |
| Kind | pathology |
| Archetypal function | The Distortion |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Legitimacy Trap belongs to the **System Pathologies** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Legitimacy Trap shows how political capacities deform through scale, opacity, feedback failure, exclusion, or self-protection, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Legitimacy Trap, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Distortion.** Legitimacy Trap is mapped as the distortion: it shows how political capacities deform through scale, opacity, feedback failure, exclusion, or self-protection.

## Gift

names mechanisms that otherwise masquerade as inevitability; through Legitimacy Trap, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

becomes a cynical label that replaces causal analysis; Legitimacy Trap can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Legitimacy Trap to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Distortion enters through Legitimacy Trap. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Legitimacy Trap becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**resource.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Legitimacy Trap; another player names a countermove. Initiative 3.

## Relationships

- **constrains — Performative Reform:** Performative Reform constrains Legitimacy Trap by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **translates into — Security Council:** Security Council translates into Legitimacy Trap by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **amplifies — Cosmopolitanism:** Legitimacy Trap amplifies Cosmopolitanism by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Legitimacy Trap from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Legitimacy Trap is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Legitimacy Trap: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [Preventing Policy Capture](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/preventing-policy-capture_9789264065239-en.html) — OECD, 2017. Mechanisms and safeguards concerning capture of public decision-making.
- [V-Dem Dataset and Codebook](https://www.v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/) — V-Dem Institute, 2026. Comparative measurement of democratic institutions; indicators remain model-based measures.
- [Guidance for Regulation of Digital Platforms](https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000387339) — UNESCO, 2023. Platform governance, expression, information integrity, and rights.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
