Institutional Systems: Admissibility, Identity, and Structural Persistence

This paper extends the Paton System into the domain of institutional systems, treating institutions as collective decision structures operating within bounded admissibility corridors. Building upon constraint primacy, the Boundary–Relation–Persistence (BRP) framework, and the Lowest Admissible Configuration (LCD) under strain principle, the work formalises institutional identity, policy admissibility, structural compression, and collapse conditions. Institutions are modelled as collective state machines whose survival depends on preserving an invariant identity datum within a constrained configuration space. Under increasing structural strain, governance degrees of freedom compress toward a minimal viable configuration; if that configuration becomes inadmissible, restructuring or collapse follows. The framework is descriptive rather than prescriptive and introduces no new ontology, applying the same constraint-first operator established in prior Paton publications.