Systemic Denial of Service (SDoS) in Institutional Systems: A Flow-Based Model of Governance Failure

v4.0 Abstract / Description Institutional systems such as judicial, administrative, and digitally mediated governance environments frequently exhibit persistent non-delivery of outcomes despite procedural compliance and operationally valid process structures. Existing analyses commonly interpret such conditions through legal, administrative, sociological, or organizational perspectives. While these approaches provide important descriptive insights, they do not fully capture the structural dynamics through which institutional processes may become progressively non-executable under interacting operational constraints. This paper develops a systems-theoretic framework in which institutional processes are modeled as constrained flows within distributed governance environments. Building on this abstraction, the paper introduces a structural failure class referred to as Systemic Denial of Service (SDoS), characterized by the persistent non-executability of procedurally admissible flows despite continued rule compliance. Four interacting failure modes are identified: flow blockage, latency accumulation, constraint saturation, and observability failure. An illustrative judicial-process mapping demonstrates how such conditions may emerge structurally without requiring intent-based explanations or explicit rule violations. The framework shifts analytical emphasis from actor-centric interpretations toward architectural properties of institutional systems, including executability, observability, and constraint interaction. The paper additionally outlines falsifiability pathways, operationalization variables, simulation approaches, and potential empirical proxies intended to support future computational and institutional evaluation. More broadly, the work suggests executability as a potentially distinct systems property relevant to governance architectures, distributed institutional environments, and complex socio-technical systems.