THE INSTITUTIONAL PATHWAY-SUSPICION REVERSAL PRINCIPLE (IPSRP) A Conditional Theory of Rule-Conforming Leadership, Career Transition, and Motive Suspicion in Collective-Action Systems

Political movements can provide routes through which individuals acquire public recognition, organizational influence, representative authority, and access to formal political careers. Yet successful movement leaders may subsequently encounter suspicion concerning their motives. An activity previously interpreted as legitimate collective action may be retrospectively interpreted as an instrument of personal advancement. This possibility creates an analytical tension between the process through which leadership is produced and the criteria through which the motives of the resulting leader are evaluated.This paper proposes the Institutional Pathway-Suspicion Reversal Principle (IPSRP), a conditional theoretical framework for examining that tension. Its primary case is the Movement-Origin Political Career Suspicion Case (MOPCSC), in which a person moves from leadership in a collective movement to a formal political career and is subsequently evaluated by other actors. The proposed default mechanism, the Pathway-to-Suspicion Conversion Mechanism (PSCM), distinguishes pathway dependence, pathway compliance, role-to-career conversion, motive ambiguity, suspicion attribution, legitimacy differentiation, and feedback dynamics.The framework operationalizes pathway dependence, pathway compliance, benefit salience, motive ambiguity, baseline distrust, adverse framing, observable inconsistency, goal-action congruence, accountability, procedural integrity, attributed suspicion, and two forms of perceived legitimacy. It specifies a multiplicative pathway-suspicion potential, a statistical model for attributed suspicion, separate models for procedural and motivational legitimacy, a descriptive reversal index, and a dynamic extension. Ten hypotheses, seventeen analytical layers, nine research domains, boundary conditions, counterexamples, alternative explanations, and a staged empirical research protocol are defined.The model does not assume that suspicion proves misconduct, that political career development is inherently illegitimate, or that the proposed relationships are universal. Its distinct contribution remains a research proposition until comparative evidence, measurement tests, causal identification, and robustness analyses establish which parts of the architecture are supported.Keywords: institutional pathways; social movements; political careerism; motive attribution; suspicion; procedural legitimacy; political trust; collective action; causal inference; formal theory