Institutional friction, not structural capacity, dominates national resilience
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States with comparable resources produce opposite outcomes under overload, yetwidely used resilience indices cannot explain why. Here we separate national resilienceinto structural capacity, institutional agency, external load, and institutional friction,scoring 36 countries across 39 indicators in four domains. Friction – corruption, cen-sorship, elite capture – correlates with aggregate resilience at 𝜌=−0.97 and varies6.0×across the sample against a 2.4×range for structural capacity, making frictionthe primary axis of differentiation and compressing the conversion of capacity into re-silience by a factor of three. Two-thirds of countries are bottlenecked in Coordination.A 2013-2023 comparison of Finland, Russia, and Ukraine reveals opposite institutionaltrajectories on identical indicators. Twenty-one robustness tests and validation againstsix established indices (𝜌= 0.90) confirm the findings. The binding constraint onnational resilience is institutional friction, not structural deficit.
