The Ideological Correspondence Hypothesis: How the Epistemology of Ideology Determines the Modality of Power and Post-Crisis Morphology

The comparative analysis of authoritarian regimes has traditionally oscillated between the Scylla of "great man" theories, which reduce macro-historical patterns to biographical contingency, and the Charybdis of structural determinism, which often obscures the distinct character of specific regimes behind statistical aggregates. While contemporary structural-demographic models excel at forecasting the temporal onset of systemic crises, they remain largely silent on the consequential problem of prognosis: forecasting the specific morphology of the successor regime. This article addresses this predictive gap by proposing the Ideological Correspondence Hypothesis. Building upon the Anatomy of Chaos theoretical framework, we posit that the operational strategy of a regime is structurally determined by the epistemological architecture of its dominant ideology. We argue that regimes grounded in materialist-rationalist epistemologies instinctively prioritize Structural Resilience Engineering (SRI), creating systems that are institutionally robust yet brittle in the face of legitimacy deficits. Conversely, regimes grounded in irrationalist-mythic epistemologies prioritize Archetypal Mobilization (AAI), generating intense charismatic loyalty but structural vulnerability to elite fragmentation. Through a comparative analysis of paradigmatic historical cases—contrasting the survival of the Stalinist bureaucracy against the collapse of the Nazi charismatic state, and examining the internal epistemological shift from Maoist voluntarism to Dengist pragmatism—we demonstrate that a regime’s underlying theory of knowledge serves as a robust predictor of its strategic behavior and post-crisis trajectory. Finally, we extend this hypothesis to contemporary geopolitical analysis, offering falsifiable forecasts for the trajectories of current theocratic and neo-authoritarian regimes, suggesting that the study of ideology must move beyond descriptive sociology to become a central component of predictive political science.