The Residue of Tragic Choice: Institutions, Memory and the Politics of Unrealised Values

Theories of institutional change explain persistence and transformation through adaptive efficiency, path dependence, distributive conflict or gradual drift. This article argues that these approaches remain incomplete when, within a historically available institutional horizon, binding institutional choices must give form to constitutive claims that cannot be fully co-realised. Such choices produce not only costs, winners or losers, but a constitutive loss whose socially organised afterlife is institutional residue. The article distinguishes the tragic structure of the originating choice from the subsequent life of the residue, which may sustain grief, critique, learning, reparation and future change. It interprets residue as a stratified component of institutions and distinguishes three strategies of residue management: encapsulation, displacement and recursive contestation. It thus proposes a middle-range theory of socio-institutional change as the conflictual management of unabsorbed losses.