Political Exit as an Ex Ante Choice Set: Measuring Actor-Initiable Alternatives in Premodern China
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Existing work links political fragmentation to greater elite exit ability, including movement from one polity to another. The historical measurement problem is narrower and prior to any substantive fragmentation claim: at the moment a political center turns against a particular actor, how can we know whether an apex-independent alternative actually belonged to that actorโs ex ante choice set? This paper develops a conservative actor ร decision-time ร political-node measure. A positive option requires three separately coded conditions: the destination lies outside the focal apexโs ordinary internal coercive command (๐ +); the actor has practically relevant knowledge of that destination (๐พ+); and the actor retains an actor-controlled first move toward or into it at the focal moment (๐+). Receiver acceptance, later asylum, pardon, reinstatement, survival, and realized success are excluded from the primary construct. Historical silence maps to unresolved rather than negative evidence. Two empirical exercises stress-test the measure. A Western Han pilot starts from a pre-specified 26-commander universe, identifies fourteen serious Han-apex setback episodes, and evaluates 192 actor-node uses. Three actor-times are OPTION-IDENTIFIED, with four positive node codes; every positive occurs among active frontier commanders vis-ร -vis current adversaries or targets. A second exercise constructs a source-bounded registry of 24 senior Qin actors in 338โ251 BCE. Only one case yields a usable serious-setback decision window: the detention of Mengchang Jun at the Qin court. Outcome-blind node enumeration identifies thirteen structurally external political nodes, all coded ๐+. The actor has direct practical knowledge of Qi, but the surviving evidence does not establish a Qi-directed or other external first move while detention is active; all thirteen ๐, ๐ต, and ๐ถ cells remain unresolved. The result is methodological rather than causal. The Western Han exercise recovers a narrow battlefield-redirection form of exit capacity; the Qin court stress test shows that a dense external political topology does not itself establish actor-controlled initiability. The paper therefore offers a reproducible measurement foundation for historical exit choice sets. It does not estimate a fragmentation effect and does not address downstream outcomes such as talent activation or retention.
Author: Wang, Kai
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204256601
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