Bureaucracy as Liability: Administrative Complexity and Polity Collapse across 5,000 Years

Does bureaucratic complexity extend or shorten the lifespan of political entities? Classical state formation theory — from Weber to Fukuyama — predicts that administrative depth stabilizes polities by enabling taxation, law enforcement, and territorial control. This paper subjects this claim to its first large-scale empirical test, analyzing 372 polities across 3,400 BCE to 1987 CE using the Seshat Global History Databank and Cliopatria geospatial dataset. Employing Cox proportional hazards models with controls for historical era, world region, and administrative scale, we find that bureaucratic complexity is associated with a 146% increase in collapse hazard (p<0.001) — the opposite of the conventional prediction. Three additional findings sharpen this result. First, the effect decays monotonically across historical eras, remaining strongest in ancient polities and disappearing entirely after 1500 CE. Second, decomposing the bureaucratic index reveals that administrative officials increase collapse risk while professional judicial institutions significantly reduce it. Third, results are robust to restriction of the sample to Eurasia. These findings challenge Weberian assumptions about administrative rationalization as a stabilizing force and identify judicial institutionalization as a neglected mechanism of long-run state durability.