Pre-Registration: Civic Recovery-Time Baseline (TA-26Q4-RT) and Caloosahatchee Recovery Test

Pre-registration: Civic Recovery-Time Baseline (TA-26Q4-RT) and Caloosahatchee Recovery Test (W1) Oct 29, 2026 · @Marcus Robinson Status: Registered version, frozen October 30, 2026. The status line inside the file reflects the document’s state at the moment of freezing. No data had been downloaded. Purpose and question This test decides whether the U.S. institutional floor is flattening, or is a basin that drifted down and has stabilized. It does that by asking whether civic recovery time has lengthened over the past 25 years. The ATT Internal Terrain Assessment v3.1 leaves the floor's failure mode undetermined. Average confidence in 14 institutions fell from about 43% in the early 2000s to below 30% since 2022. A falling level alone cannot separate two readings: Flattening: the basin is eroding. Recovery after shocks slows, so the lag-1 autocorrelation of detrended fluctuations rises over time (Scheffer et al., 2009; Dakos et al., 2012). Slow basin migration: the basin's bottom moved down while keeping its shape. The series tracks it, recovery time stays flat, and there is no failure in the grammar's sense. The ATT manuscript states the method (§7.1). For a system near the bottom of its basin observed at intervals Δt, recovery rate κ relates to lag-1 autocorrelation ρ₁ by: \kappa \approx -\frac{\ln \rho_{1}}{\Delta t} Scope. This test addresses the institutional floor only. It does not test decoupling at the federal foreign-policy node; signed tracking lag there needs a trust series more frequent than any public one. Civic systems are a candidate domain in the manuscript (§6.2), so any result here is [Extension] evidence, not a test of ATT's formal core.