Capital Exhaustibility and the Stability of Institutional Authority

Capital--legitimacy substitution explains how external capital comes to supply decision authority in institutions under pressure. It does not explain why some funding arrangements produce that condition chronically and others do not. This paper takes up that question and answers it with the temporal structure of capital. Finite capital must be renewed; renewal is granted rather than automatic; anticipation of the grant reshapes decisions long before it arrives. Institutions funded this way do not face substitution as an occasional crisis, because each renewal cycle manufactures the scarcity that makes substitution decisive. The paper's own cases show that the operative variable is narrower than its title. Exhaustibility and renewal discretion are separable, and it is discretion that binds: a fund continued by rule does not generate dependency however finite it is, and an endowment with discretionary draw rules generates it despite being permanent. Exhaustibility sets how often an institution is exposed; discretion sets whether exposure constrains. Both are design choices, and the distinction is what makes the diagnosis actionable. Four conditions follow for capital that does not destabilise authority: regeneration, continuity without discretionary renewal, temporal alignment with the institution's mandate, and separation of capital provision from operational authority. They are necessary and not sufficient — and they are incomplete in one respect the corpus can supply, since capital that satisfies all four and is too small still cannot fund a contested decision.