A Recurring Capture Pattern in Democratic Governance: Structural Convergence Toward Short-Term Rational Policy Behavior

Abstract
This paper documents a Recurring Capture Pattern (RCP) observed in
representative democratic governance and policy evaluation systems.
Under the institutional condition of
a temporal structure in which policy evaluation cycles are shorter than the time
required for policy impacts to emerge,
individually rational behavior systematically converges not toward
long-term institutional adaptation and sustainable public policy improvement,
but toward
short-term evaluation optimization behavior.
As these behaviors accumulate, they alter the operational conditions of the system itself,
resulting in
the increasing dependence of policy evaluation and political decision-making on
short-term measurable indicators,
and reinforcing the same behavioral convergence through a recursive institutional feedback
loop.
The pattern ultimately produces
a structural decline in the institutional capacity for long-term policy adaptation,
indicating a structural misalignment between institutional objectives and rational behavioral
adaptation.
This paper analytically describes the structural relationship between institutional design and
rational behavioral adaptation.
The document does not propose policy implementation, funding structures, normative policy
evaluation, or institutional deployment strategies, but instead presents design principles and
operational modules as analytical references for institutional design.