The Congress state had conflicting incentives both to introduce and to withhold rural innovations.

Evidence

The greater variety of acceptable credit, and the development of a more reliable market for agricultural produce, which together caused the change in the status quo, are the result of moderate innovations introduced by a state whose governing party, Congress, has had as strong a reason for withholding them as for not. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1615

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a governing party can genuinely desire a status-quo change while being structurally the very force that upholds that status quo — self-undermining state action — rewards sustained reflection.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s social-capital material on how institutions sustain equilibria, and Hirschman-type analysis of state self-subversion.