How Political Institutions May Converge—Institutional Learning Selective Integration and Adaptive Governance Evolution

Whether political institutions will converge under modernization, globalization, and cross-border learning remains a central question in comparative politics, institutional theory, and political economy. Existing accounts pull in opposite directions. One tradition expects similar governance problems to generate similar institutional arrangements; another emphasizes path dependence, cultural meaning, distributional conflict, and institutional complementarities, all of which sustain durable diversity. This article argues that the question cannot be answered adequately by asking whether political systems will ultimately become identical. It proposes the Institutional Learning and Adaptive Evolution Model (ILAEM), which treats political institutions not as indivisible regime types but as configurations of mechanisms performing governance functions: information acquisition, interest expression, coordination, constraint, implementation, public-service provision, feedback, error correction, and cross-level cooperation. On this basis, the article distinguishes formal convergence, functional convergence, and mechanism convergence. It argues that the most plausible long-run pattern is functional convergence with structural diversity: societies may retain different constitutional and organizational forms while selectively learning, translating, adapting, testing, evaluating, and institutionalizing mechanisms that improve information quality, reduce avoidable harm, and strengthen self-correction. The article further develops a nine-stage model of institutional learning, advances nine testable propositions, specifies a multi-level and polycentric approach to governance scale, and sets normative limits on any happiness-oriented theory of governance. Institutional integration, on this account, is neither the victory of one system nor a predetermined world state. It is an open-ended process through which societies may expand a shared repertoire of governance knowledge while preserving legitimate diversity.