How Institutions Change Without Formal Redesign: The Governance Drift Curve and Authority-Control Divergence
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Distributed governance arrangements change not only through formal institutional redesign but through repeated delegation, implementation, contracting, coordination, technical mediation, and task-specific administration. Valid allocations of Institutional Authority may remain stable while Authority Exercise and Governance Control become distributed across additional sites. This article develops the Governance Drift Curve (GDC), a temporal political-science theory specified within the published Institutional Authority and Governance Dynamics (IAGD 2.2) architecture. The revised theory separates Authority-Control Divergence from Governance Drift. Divergence is the relational mismatch between the current valid Authority Configuration and the operative locations of Authority Exercise or Governance Control; Governance Drift is the temporal condition in which that divergence persists or increases while one or more dimensions of Authority-Control Alignment deteriorate and are not adequately governed by available Governance Control. Authorization may therefore remain valid even as locational, accountability, or corrective alignment weakens. Control Integrity is treated as a multidimensional theoretical construct rather than a validated scalar, and the Governance Drift Curve represents a family of conceptual trajectories rather than an estimated functional form. Authority Provenance supplies the evidentiary basis for reconstructing source, authorization, transfers, retained rights, transformations, and present location. A Medicaid managed-care prior-authorization trace illustrates the protocol without claiming empirical validation. The theory generates comparative propositions and a formalizable foundation for subsequent process tracing, network analysis, mathematical specification, agent-based simulation, and empirical testing.
Author: Davis, Daron L.
Language: English
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7163658911