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% UQO Working Paper No. 35 — The Social Compression Hypothesis
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\newcommand{\WPnumber}{35}
\newcommand{\WPtitle}{The Social Compression Hypothesis}
\newcommand{\WPsubtitle}{A Pre-Registered Test of Coordination Demand, Institutional Capacity, and Instability in Historical and Modern Societies, with a Formal Framework and Agent-Based Experiments}
\newcommand{\WPdate}{November 2026}
\newcommand{\WPversion}{1.0}
\newcommand{\WPabstract}{%
Institutions, standards, records and administrative hierarchies can be read as devices that lower the communication cost of coordinating many people: a form of compression. This paper states that reading formally, derives what it does and does not imply, and tests its empirical corollary---that a mismatch between a society's coordination demand (population, territory, settlement structure) and its coordination capacity (administration, standardized rules and money, communication infrastructure, record-keeping) predicts subsequent instability---under a frozen pre-registration. We build demand, capacity and mismatch indices from the Seshat Polaris-2026 databank (626 polities; 127 CrisisDB crisis records with polity-level predictors, dated facts preceding the crisis where they exist), the Ethnographic Atlas (1,291 societies) and a V-Dem--Maddison country-year panel (14,637 country-years, 901 distinct event-years, 1820--2025), with a transparent block index and a latent-variable alternative, uncertainty propagation and out-of-sample validation. Capacity and scale are positively associated in all three datasets (\EMP). The mismatch index is positively associated with crisis severity in Seshat ($0.20$ log-odds per SD, stable across regions, eras and cultural spheres) and with instability onsets in modern states ($0.39$ per SD), but by the pre-registered criterion it fails: it does not beat the scale-only baseline out of sample in Seshat, nor the capacity-only baseline in the modern panel; the restriction it imposes on scale and capacity is rejected in the modern panel; a placebo index is not distinguishable from it in Seshat; the modern association is nearly as strong with past as with future events; and it is not robust to an Oster-type adjustment. No threshold is found in Seshat and only a small nonlinearity in the modern panel. Among Seshat polities with a crisis record, higher capacity is also associated with a \emph{shorter} polity duration, against the hypothesis. Five theorems make the compression reading precise (coding gain, break-even scale, stale-code penalty, hierarchical routing, backlog dynamics), and factorial agent-based experiments (6,048 runs, five imposed institutional regimes, equal administrative budgets) instantiate them in silico on the cost side---bits, messages, queues---while locating the regimes where institutions hurt: unpaid set-up costs, saturated hierarchies, and weakly structured task environments (\SIM). We conclude that the compression framework is coherent and simulable, that scale and capacity each matter, but that their mismatch, as measurable in existing historical data, carries no identifiable predictive content of its own. The universal theory is not supported; the narrower results are stated with their scope.%
}
\newcommand{\WPkeywords}{institutions, coordination, state capacity, social complexity, Seshat, pre-registration, agent-based simulation, information theory}
\newcommand{\WPjel}{D02, D83, H11, N40, P48, C63}
\newcommand{\WPauthor}{Simon-Pierre Boucher}
\newcommand{\WPaffiliation}{Département des sciences administratives\\Université du Québec en Outaouais}
\newcommand{\WPemail}{simon-pierre.boucher@uqo.ca}
\newcommand{\WPaddress}{Gatineau -- Pavillon Alexandre-Taché\\283, boulevard Alexandre-Taché\\Gatineau, Québec, Canada J9A 1L8}
\usepackage[colorlinks=true,linkcolor=NavyBlue,citecolor=NavyBlue,urlcolor=NavyBlue,breaklinks=true]{hyperref}
\hypersetup{pdftitle={The Social Compression Hypothesis: A Pre-Registered Test of Coordination Demand, Institutional Capacity, and Instability},pdfauthor={Simon-Pierre Boucher}}

\begin{document}
\input{sections/titlepage}
\input{sections/introduction}
\input{sections/literature}
\input{sections/theory}
\input{sections/data}
\input{sections/methods}
\input{sections/results_historical}
\input{sections/results_modern}
\input{sections/simulation}
\input{sections/synthesis}
\input{sections/limitations}
\input{sections/conclusion}
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\bibliography{references}
\input{appendix/appendix}
\end{document}