Determination, Authorization and Pluralist Exit: An Architecture of Anti-Corruption and Equal Power

This paper seeks an architecture with two properties: corruption is excluded
structurally, and political power is formally equal. It argues first that where
substantive decisions remain within the discretionary authority of self-interested
officials, corruption cannot be excluded by supervision and punishment alone. It
then shows that the obvious alternative fails for a structural reason: political
choice is in its nature non-binary---even a minimal political state admits several
candidate actions---while among votes only the binary vote escapes the classical
ceilings, so multi-candidate voting confronts aggregation impossibility and
strategic manipulation. The paper concludes that---under the assumption that no
specification of human values enjoys universal prior agreement, so that no
predefined algorithm can govern with universal authorization---any architecture
satisfying both goals must include an independent determination function that
reduces the non-binary action space to a single proposal, which citizens authorize
or reject in an equal binary vote; the paper proposes a hypothetical mechanism, an
"oracle," that performs this function perfectly. Because the oracle selects by
internal values that need not be universally shared, and because even equal
authorization can produce majority domination, the architecture is completed by
institutional pluralism and freedom of exit: equal power within systems, freedom
of choice among them.