Why the size of a political mobilization is analytically weaker than institutional conversion.
The corpus’s most important cross-scenario correction is that visibility is not capacity. Enormous demonstrations can coexist with functioning courts, payments, elections, public administration, security chains, and essential services. A smaller but persistent movement can be more consequential when it coincides with resignations, material labor or business withdrawal, service degradation, and failed political off-ramps.
Scale can reveal grievance intensity, organizational reach, geographic diffusion, and the number of people willing to accept participation costs. It cannot by itself establish that the state is losing the ability to govern.
The diagnosis changes when mobilization alters institutional behavior: output declines, governing coalitions split, courts lose compliance, payments or administration fail, security chains become uncertain, or elections and succession stop functioning as recognized settlement mechanisms.
Without the distinction, analysis mistakes spectacle for systemic transition and overreacts to one-day peaks while underweighting slower institutional erosion. The reports explicitly recommend paired dashboards: pressure on one side, state capacity on the other.
Use these findings as mechanism-level synthesis. Historical cases are not templates, scenario ranges are not forecasts, and present-tense legal or institutional claims require current verification.