Constraint as the Marginal Cost of Predation: A Note on the Functional Substitutability of Constraint Carriers

This note argues that welfare outcomes often attributed to regime type track a more general variable: the effective marginal cost of predation faced by rulers and ruling coalitions. Constitutional rules, judicial review, coalition structure, intra-elite balance, trade dependence, geopolitical exposure, capacity-versus-constraint configurations, and some demographic structures are heterogeneous carriers of such constraint, differing in mechanism, durability, and observability. They may nonetheless be functionally substitutable on a narrower class of welfare outcomes: those sensitive to the security of household claims, limits on arbitrary extraction, and rulers' incentives to provide broadly shared goods. On this view, regime type is best treated as a noisy bundle or proxy rather than as the underlying causal variable. The note clarifies the scope of the claim, distinguishes it from a mere accounting identity, addresses the principal alternative position from the Varieties of Capitalism literature, and offers brief illustrative readings of Singapore, Liechtenstein, and Burma. The contribution is conceptual: to restate a dispersed literature as a common hypothesis and to indicate observable implications for empirical work.