Political Hysteresis: A Formal Heuristic for Institutional Conductivity (K) and Adaptive Velocity (A)

Traditional historiography often analyzes regime stability through qualitative narratives, leading to retrospective descriptions rather than predictive mechanics. This paper proposes a formal systems-theoretic framework aligned with the goals of Cliodynamics, based on the Ontogenetic Principle of Cultural Dynamics (Dağ, 2026a). We model political evolution as a discrete-time optimization problem under constraints using the equation Ct+1 = e ^−KCt + (1 − e ^−K)A⃗. By defining Institutional Conductivity (K) and Adaptive Targets (A⃗) as operational variables, we analyze three distinct system states: (1) Systemic Decoherence (e.g., Soviet Collapse); (2) Mass-Interaction Scaling (e.g., China); and (3) Vectorial Cancellation (e.g., High-Friction Democracies). We emphasize that this model is a first-order heuristic framework designed to generate structural hypotheses regarding the thermodynamic limits of cultural adaptation.