Constitutional Capital: Separating Authority from Discretion in Long-Horizon Systems

Analyses of institutional abuse, capture and dependency typically focus on actor intent, governance quality or ethical norms. This paper advances a different claim: abuse of trust is not primarily a moral failure but an architectural one. Wherever capital renewal is discretionary, authority accumulates regardless of intention — enabling dependency, behavioural distortion and soft coercion without requiring malice. Where renewal is constitutional, that channel of leverage is removed. Conventional responses — oversight, transparency, ethical stewardship, decentralisation — do not resolve the problem, because each leaves discretionary renewal intact. In such systems power concentrates at renewal points, converting capital scarcity into implicit authority even under benevolent administration. The paper introduces constitutional capital as a design category in which authority is exercised ex ante through rule-setting rather than ex post through approval, and closes by identifying how such architectures fail: not by capture but by reversion, the gradual return of discretion under conditions of urgency or moral justification.