Authority under Its Own Evidence Adjudicative Dependence, Effective Contestability, and the Diachronic Verification of Legitimacy

Political authority does not operate over a pre-given field of facts, objections, and historical comparisons. It also participates in maintaining the infrastructures through which relevant differences become adjudicable, challenges acquire institutional force, and past exercises of authority remain comparable with present ones. This paper develops a narrow theory of legitimacy verification rather than a general theory of legitimate authority. It distinguishes actor-indexed adjudicability (Δ), the dependency topology of challenge routes (Γ), and diachronic trace structures that preserve rule and jurisdictional comparability. The central claim is conditional: when an authority invokes an empirical justificatory property—such as competence, responsiveness, contestability, or non-arbitrariness—the continuing evidential force of that claim depends on maintaining institutional conditions capable of discriminating its failure. Formal plurality of oversight is therefore insufficient when review channels share critical upstream dependencies. Because de-correlated challenge is costly to maintain, challenge architectures may become more correlated through locally reasonable consolidation even without capture, deception, or anti-democratic intent. Such contraction can reduce adverse findings and thereby create apparent success that further weakens the case for restoring independent challenge. The paper calls this a self-obscuring hollowing mechanism and derives diagnostic implications for accountability, transparency, institutional design, and diachronic claims of authority continuity.