Gap. Existing theories of authoritarian persistence often treat ideological conformity and material coercion as separate mechanisms, leaving insufficient analytical integration between individual selection pressures and institutional lock-in. Question. This article asks how cognitive and material selection pressures interact across hierarchical levels to explain regime durability despite weak performance, declining legitimacy, or broad social dissatisfaction. Method. The article integrates Tgmenks, or the Theory of Gene Machines in the Ecological Niche of Knowledge (Khurshid 2026a), with Extended Phenotype Theory (Lerer 2025a; 2025b) through a multilevel selection framework formalized in the MLSARS agent-based architecture and examined against five historical cases: North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Pahlavi Iran, China, and the late Soviet Union. Result. In the present comparative coding and stylized simulation space, regimes classified as high in cognitive conformity (CLI-cog: High) persist approximately 2.3 times longer than low-CLI regimes despite substantially lower long-run adaptive performance, here represented by a roughly 40% decline in economic and informational responsiveness under conditions of extreme closure. The model architecture further predicts hysteresis effects: under high-lock-in conditions, elite composition remains near 85% pro-regime even five years after an exogenous shock. Contribution. The framework unifies micro-level elite selection and macro-level institutional persistence through explicit multilevel dynamics, generating falsifiable predictions that narrative typologies often leave implicit. Impact. Computational protocols and replication code are open-sourced at https://github.com/adrianlerer/multilevel-selection-abm for extension across authoritarian contexts.
Ignacio Adrián LERER (Mon,) studied this question.
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