Governance Topology

Enter access code to preview

Incorrect code

A Cambridge Governance Labs Research Initiative

Governance Topology

Every regime has coordinates.
Every trajectory has odds.

Quantitative frameworks for mapping democratic erosion, forecasting regime trajectories, and pricing sovereign risk.

Liberty + Tyranny + Chaos = 100

Three Analytical Pillars

A unified framework connecting political topology, predictive trajectory modeling, and sovereign credit dynamics.

01

Political Topology

Mapping every nation's governance as ternary coordinates — Liberty, Tyranny, Chaos — revealing the geometry of political systems and the attractor basins that trap them.

1,656
Data points · 91 countries · 1800–2026
02

Trajectory Forecasting

Eight-step erosion models, event horizon thresholds, and Monte Carlo projections transforming political observation into probabilistic forecasts with testable predictions.

62%
US consolidated autocracy probability by 2040
03

Sovereign Credit Dynamics

Political signals lead market responses by decades. Connecting governance erosion to sovereign spreads, yield curves, and the repricing events markets refuse to anticipate.

42%
US extend-pretend pathway probability
91
Countries mapped
225
Years of data
r = 0.57
Liberty–capability
correlation (post-1990)
0%
Democracies recovered
after crossing event horizon

The Central Thesis

The Great Decoupling

For two centuries, political liberty and human development moved in lockstep. Nations that freed their citizens prospered; nations that didn't, stagnated. The correlation was an article of democratic faith.

That faith is now empirically wrong.

The correlation between political freedom and human capabilities has fallen from r = 0.79 before 1900 to r = 0.57 after 1990. Capable autocracies now outnumber free democracies for the first time in modern history.

Governance Topology quantifies this decoupling — mapping the attractor basins that trap hybrid regimes, the event horizons past which democratic recovery becomes statistically impossible, and the sovereign credit repricing that markets have not yet begun to price.

This is not political commentary. It is measurement. Every regime has coordinates. Every trajectory has odds. And every erosion, eventually, has a price.

Coming Soon

Full publication and interactive research tools launching 2026

Launching 2026

The Publication

Book cover concept

Governance
Topology

Democratic erosion, regime trajectories, and the sovereign credit repricing the world has not yet priced.

Every regime has coordinates.
Every trajectory has odds.

John Barker & Team

About the Work

Scope
91 countries, 225 years of political topology data, with sovereign credit analysis and predictive trajectory modeling
Central Finding
Political systems exhibit three attractor basins — tyranny, hybrid trap, and democratic plateau — not the binary stable states previously theorized
Event Horizon
Below Liberty score 60, zero democracies have recovered since 1990. The threshold is gravitational, not gradual.
Implications
Sovereign credit markets lag political signals by decades. The repricing, when it arrives, will be abrupt.