Cognitive Comparability and the Limits of Governance: Evaluating Authority Under Radical Capability Asymmetry

Governance theory presupposes a rough cognitive comparability between governors and governed. This paper makes that assumption explicit and testable through a six-dimension evaluation framework covering legitimacy, accountability, corrigibility, non-domination, subsidiarity, and institutional resilience, drawn from political legitimacy theory, principal-agent models, republican theory, and the AI alignment literature. The framework is first demonstrated on existing non-majoritarian institutions, where capability asymmetry is real but bounded, and then applied to a prospective case of bounded superintelligent authority, where the asymmetry is radical. Four of six dimensions show structural failures. Two of the four appear tractable to institutional design (subsidiarity scope limitation and institutional resilience). The other two, the public reason problem under cognitive incomprehensibility and the non-domination problem under permanent capability asymmetry, call for new normative theory rather than better institutional design. The analysis also finds that dimensions which operate as independent checks under bounded asymmetry begin to degrade together under radical asymmetry, because each depends on the same oversight capacity. The assumptions that allowed these checks to remain independent have gone unexamined so far because they have always held.