1% ============================================================================2% UQO Working Paper No. 35 — The Social Compression Hypothesis3% Built on the UQO working-paper template (_modele-working-paper). Compile: latexmk -pdf main.tex4% ============================================================================5\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}67\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}8\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}9\usepackage[english]{babel}10\usepackage[letterpaper,top=1in,bottom=1in,left=1in,right=1in]{geometry}11\usepackage{mathptmx}12\usepackage{microtype}13\usepackage{setspace}14\onehalfspacing15\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb,amsthm}16\usepackage{booktabs}17\usepackage{tabularx}18\usepackage{multirow}19\usepackage{threeparttable}20\usepackage{longtable}21\usepackage{array}22\usepackage{graphicx}23\usepackage{subcaption}24\usepackage{float}25\usepackage{rotating}26\usepackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor}27\usepackage{url}28\usepackage[authoryear,round,semicolon]{natbib}29\bibliographystyle{aer}30\usepackage[font=small,labelfont=bf,labelsep=period,justification=justified,singlelinecheck=false]{caption}31\usepackage{fancyhdr}32\pagestyle{fancy}33\fancyhf{}34\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}35\fancyfoot[C]{\thepage}36\usepackage{titlesec}37\titleformat{\section}{\large\bfseries}{\thesection.}{0.5em}{}38\titleformat{\subsection}{\normalsize\bfseries}{\thesubsection.}{0.5em}{}39\titleformat{\subsubsection}{\normalsize\itshape}{\thesubsubsection.}{0.5em}{}40\usepackage[toc,page]{appendix}41\usepackage{enumitem}42\setlist{nosep,leftmargin=*}43\usepackage{amsthm}44\theoremstyle{plain}45\newtheorem{theorem}{Theorem}46\newtheorem{corollary}{Corollary}47\newtheorem{proposition}{Proposition}48\newtheorem{conjecture}{Conjecture}49\theoremstyle{definition}50\newtheorem{definition}{Definition}51\newtheorem{assumption}{Assumption}52\newcommand{\EMP}{\textsc{[empirical]}}53\newcommand{\SIM}{\textsc{[simulated]}}54\newcommand{\CONJ}{\textsc{[conjecture]}}55\newcommand{\PROP}{\textsc{[proposition]}}56\newcolumntype{L}[1]{>{\raggedright\arraybackslash}p{#1}}5758% ============================================================================59% METADATA60% ============================================================================61\newcommand{\WPnumber}{35}62\newcommand{\WPtitle}{The Social Compression Hypothesis}63\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}64\newcommand{\WPdate}{November 2026}65\newcommand{\WPversion}{1.0}66\newcommand{\WPabstract}{%67Institutions, 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 pre-crisis predictors), the Ethnographic Atlas (1,291 societies) and a V-Dem--Maddison country-year panel (14,637 country-years, 2,692 instability events, 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 and eras) and with instability onsets in modern states ($0.40$ 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; a placebo index performs comparably; the modern association is as strong with past as with future events; and an Oster adjustment reverses its sign. No threshold is found in Seshat and only a negligible nonlinearity in the modern panel. 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) confirm them in silico 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.%68}69\newcommand{\WPkeywords}{institutions, coordination, state capacity, social complexity, Seshat, pre-registration, agent-based simulation, information theory}70\newcommand{\WPjel}{D02, D83, H11, N40, P48, C63}71\newcommand{\WPauthor}{Simon-Pierre Boucher}72\newcommand{\WPaffiliation}{Département des sciences administratives\\Université du Québec en Outaouais}73\newcommand{\WPemail}{simon-pierre.boucher@uqo.ca}74\newcommand{\WPaddress}{Gatineau -- Pavillon Alexandre-Taché\\283, boulevard Alexandre-Taché\\Gatineau, Québec, Canada J9A 1L8}75\usepackage[colorlinks=true,linkcolor=NavyBlue,citecolor=NavyBlue,urlcolor=NavyBlue,breaklinks=true]{hyperref}76\hypersetup{pdftitle={The Social Compression Hypothesis: A Pre-Registered Test of Coordination Demand, Institutional Capacity, and Instability},pdfauthor={Simon-Pierre Boucher}}7778\begin{document}79\input{sections/titlepage}80\input{sections/introduction}81\input{sections/literature}82\input{sections/theory}83\input{sections/data}84\input{sections/methods}85\input{sections/results_historical}86\input{sections/results_modern}87\input{sections/simulation}88\input{sections/synthesis}89\input{sections/limitations}90\input{sections/conclusion}91\newpage92\bibliography{references}93\input{appendix/appendix}94\end{document}95