Competing democratic and autocratic long-run regimes in a minimal norm-institution model

A minimal dynamical model was used to examine whether democratic and autocratic regime outcomes can emerge as competing long-run basins under coupled interactions among norm compliance, elite pressure, institutional strength, and polarization. The baseline parameterization produced a democracy-leaning regime while retaining a nontrivial autocratic basin. Systematic exploration of parameter space further revealed an extended transition band in which both outcomes remained viable and in which information-theoretic diagnostics became most informative. In that region, entropy over coarse-grained states contracted early in the trajectory and later increased again as runs separated into alternative futures, while mutual information between the current state and the eventual regime rose strongly over time. Additional deterministic exploration of the full four-dimensional state space revealed sharp basin boundaries in multiple pairwise projections, a strongly bimodal finalscore distribution from random initial conditions, and compact terminal state clusters in principal-component space. The results indicate that parameter variation in the explored neighborhood primarily alters basin occupancy rather than abolishing one regime type altogether. The model therefore supports the view that democratic and autocratic outcomes may coexist as rival long-run basins, with the most informative dynamics occurring not in one-basin corners of parameter space but in the transition region where both futures remain attainable for a substantial portion of the trajectory.