Institutions decay when social mobilisation outruns their capacity to absorb it, so modernisation can destabilise rather than consolidate.
Huntington's 1968 argument against the assumption that modernisation produces stability. Mobilisation outruns institutionalisation, and the gap is where coups and breakdowns occur.
In practice
- A country whose universities expand faster than its civil service can absorb graduates produces an educated class with no institutional route.
- A firm that quadruples headcount without building management capacity produces exactly the instability Huntington describes, on a smaller scale.
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