Behavioral Boundary Relativity: Structural Conditions for Stability and Breakdown in Collective Systems

This paper introduces Behavioral Boundary Relativity (BBR) as a structural and falsifiable framework for analyzing political stability, leadership turnover, and regime collapse across institutional types and historical periods. Rather than advancing a regime-specific or context-dependent theory, BBR applies a fixed functional structure to political systems as a domain-specific instantiation of a general behavioral boundary model. Within this framework, political stability is represented as the interaction of three structurally distinct components: a material channel capturing economic output and systemic redundancy, a legitimacy channel reflecting trust, ideological cohesion, and mobilizing narratives, and an external field accounting for exogenous or resource-based support. These components jointly determine a system’s proximity to a critical stability boundary. As this boundary is approached or crossed, political systems adjust through a limited set of structurally defined pathways, including material recovery, legitimacy reinforcement, leadership turnover, or systemic exit. The BBR framework is designed to be transparent and empirically testable. All variables are constructed directly from publicly available data without smoothing, parameter tuning, or regime-specific calibration. The model is explicitly falsifiable: sustained long-term political stability following a collapse of material capacity without compensatory legitimacy or external support would violate the structural constraints proposed by BBR. The framework is applied to a diverse set of cases—including electoral democracies, parliamentary systems, socialist regimes, and ideologically driven states—revealing consistent boundary-driven patterns across political contexts. Rather than offering point predictions, this preprint provides a structural reference model for evaluating political continuity and regime change as empirical events unfold. The document is released as a preprint to facilitate open discussion and long-term assessment of the framework’s explanatory scope. Related Structural Frameworks The present study constitutes a domain-specific application of Behavioral Boundary Relativity (BBR) to political stability and regime change. To clarify the structural origin, generality, and cross-domain consistency of the proposed framework, the following related works provide the theoretical and geometric foundations upon which this analysis is built: • Behavioral Boundary Relativity (BBR): A Universal Constraint Model for All Behavior-Capable Systems(behavioral domain core framework)⟶ https://zenodo.org/records/17538912 • The Structural Unified Field Equation: A Minimal Geometric Bridge between Classical, Electromagnetic, and Quantum Regimes(structural origin of the boundary-based geometry)⟶ https://zenodo.org/records/17569228 • Economic Relativity Model (ERM): Incentive Boundaries and Economic Crises(economic domain instantiation of the same structural law)⟶ https://zenodo.org/records/17538941 • The Structural Cognitive Field (SCF): From Unified Field Geometry to the Physics of Consciousness(cognitive domain instantiation of boundary-driven behavior)⟶ https://zenodo.org/records/17927709 • Structural Unified Field: Boundary, Tension, and the Geometry of Existence(foundational monograph providing the full conceptual and geometric development of SUF and its behavioral projection)⟶ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FTTGVCNJ