Structural Hollowing in Regulatory Assurance: How Compliance Can Persist without Deception

Regulatory compliance is often treated as evidence that the practices or capabilities a rule is meant to secure remain in place. This article develops a theory of structural hollowing: an accepted qualification persists while task-relevant realization declines without deception or rule breaking. The argument separates realization, adjudication, qualification, and institutional consequence; distinguishes observational from normative thickness in accepted classes; and treats adjudicability as a maintained organizational capacity rather than a fixed monitoring parameter. When qualification has independent value, lower realization is reachable and locally less burdensome, recurring selection opportunities create downward pressure. Hollowing becomes cumulative only when hysteresis makes restoration harder and may weaken the challenge, evidence, or memory capacities that would reveal the loss. The framework yields failure-locus-specific diagnostics and explains why adverse findings can decline either because performance improved or because the system became less capable of generating findings against its own accepted states.