Decision Coherence as a Universal Criterion

This work presents a complete, non-partisan, and fully documented audit of decision coherence, treating a decision not as an isolated act but as a trajectory unfolding across multiple states. The analysis applies a single coherence framework uniformly to all states of a decision: intention, formulation, engagement, collective dynamics, execution, trace, support, diffusion, and time. Coherence is defined operationally as the capacity of a decision to remain non-contradictory and maintainable without continuous compensation. The empirical case examined is the dissolution of the French National Assembly announced on 9 June 2024. This decision offers a rare and exceptional object of study: it was constitutionally valid, clearly formulated, publicly justified, massively diffused, collectively evaluated by institutions, media, and citizens, and followed by observable consequences over an extended period. The work relies exclusively on publicly available, verifiable, and dated sources, including official speeches and decrees, electoral results, parliamentary events, media coverage, polling data, and longitudinal institutional outcomes. The results show a clear divergence between high local coherence at the levels of intention and formulation, and progressive systemic incoherence emerging at collective, operational, diffusion, and temporal levels. The loss of coherence is shown to be neither ideological nor legal in nature, but structural, arising from misalignment between decision states and the system’s capacity to absorb the decision as a whole. A central finding is that time acts as an empirical arbiter of coherence. Rather than correcting incoherence, temporal extension reveals whether compensatory mechanisms converge toward stability or accumulate as structural debt. In the case studied, repeated corrective actions and governance reconfigurations failed to restore a stable trajectory, confirming the non-maintainability of the decision without continuous compensation. Beyond the specific case, the framework is domain-independent and directly transferable to governance, board-level decision-making, organizational strategy, and large-scale institutional or technological decisions. It does not evaluate legitimacy, morality, or strategic intent, and it does not propose alternative decisions or counterfactual scenarios. Its sole purpose is to provide a rigorous, reproducible method for auditing whether a decision can hold across its states before failure, fatigue, or escalation occur. The work includes a full scientific white paper (IMRaD structure), an executive B2B brief, visual diagnostics, a factual corpus, methodological appendices, and a meta-audit in which the paper itself is subjected to the same coherence framework. The final release is sealed with a cryptographic hash to guarantee integrity and traceability.