Rising regime capacity loss triggered a collective theft spiral

Evidence

In response, officials and managers engaged in a sort of run on the bank: wherever they could divert fungible assets to their own advantage, they increasingly did so. They started stealing the state (Solnick 1998). The more one person stole, the more reason the next person had to steal before no assets remained. Soon a large share of government resources had moved into private hands. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1234

Categorization

• XREF: This is a regime-capacity collapse mechanism; connects to the reader’s core interest in how capacity changes shift repertoires of contention. The ‘run on the bank’ logic is a nice concrete example of capacity decline feeding contention rather than absorption defusing it. — connects to: Capacity loss in nondemocratic regimes raises collective violence, as in the post-1985 USSR. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 764; Extractive theft without basic infrastructure delivery provokes rebellion — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 113; Loss of central authority leads to widespread societal chaos (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Does Tilly elsewhere argue capacity decline itself can be a driver of regime transformation independent of democratization pressures? Worth checking chapters on capacity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1234

Broader Connections

• Loss of central authority leads to widespread societal chaos #expands (0.82)
• Individually rational resource use leads to collective ruin when costs are shared #exemplifies (0.80) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1943
• Disembedding mechanisms remove control from individuals and create collective risk #expands (0.78) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 310
• Extractive theft without basic infrastructure delivery provokes rebellion #qualifies (0.72) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 113