# Appendix A — Pre-Registration Brief

**Manuscript:** *The Conditional Frontier: A Same-Standards Comparison of Capitalist and Socialist Institutions, 1945–2025*
**Frozen:** 30 May 2026, prior to examination of any outcome (Stream B) data.
**Purpose:** Import pre-registration discipline into comparative political economy. Criteria, metrics, weighting vectors, and case-inclusion rules below were fixed *before* outcomes were tabulated, so that case selection and scoring cannot be reverse-engineered from results. Stream A (theory/framework) research informed this freeze; Stream B (performance data) was gathered only afterward.

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## A.1 Unit of analysis

The unit is **not** the words "capitalism" / "socialism" but **institutional configurations** coded on four dimensions. This dissolves the "that wasn't real capitalism/socialism" trap: cases are placed by their structural features, not their labels or their results.

| Dimension | Range of values |
|---|---|
| **D1 Ownership of the means of production** | private / state / cooperative / mixed |
| **D2 Coordination mechanism** | market (price) / central plan / negotiated-network |
| **D3 Distribution & decommodification** | market-determined / social-wage / egalitarian-indexed |
| **D4 Political form** | liberal-democratic / authoritarian / participatory |

**Reference configurations** (placed before scoring):
- *Liberal-market capitalism (LMC):* private / market / market-determined / liberal-democratic — US, UK.
- *Coordinated & social-democratic capitalism (CSC):* mixed-private / market+negotiated / social-wage / liberal-democratic — Nordics, Germany.
- *State (political) capitalism (SC):* mixed / market+state-direction / market-determined / authoritarian — China (post-1978), Singapore.
- *Command socialism (CS):* state / central plan / egalitarian-indexed / authoritarian — USSR, DPRK, Maoist China, Cuba.
- *Market socialism & worker self-management (MS):* state/cooperative / market / egalitarian-indexed / mixed political form — Yugoslavia, Mondragón (micro), Lange–Lerner (theoretical limit).

## A.2 Evaluation criteria (N = 7, frozen)

| # | Criterion | Primary metrics | Principal source(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | **Material prosperity & dynamism** | GDP/capita (PPP); long-run growth; productivity; innovation; (shortage/soft-budget pathology as the negative pole) | WDI, Maddison, Kornai1986 |
| C2 | **Distribution** | Gini (disposable); top-10%/bottom-50% income share; poverty | OECD IDD, WIR2026, WorldBank2022_China |
| C3 | **Human development & capabilities** | life expectancy; infant mortality; education; HDI | UNDP_HDI2023, WDI_Health2022 |
| C4 | **Subjective wellbeing** | Cantril life-evaluation ladder | WHR2025 |
| C5 | **Freedom (two axes, kept separate)** | C5a political/civil liberty (V-Dem, Freedom House); C5b economic freedom (Fraser, Heritage) | FH_2025, VDem_2026, Heritage_2025, Fraser_EFW2024 |
| C6 | **Resilience & stability** | output volatility; crisis depth & recovery (transition recession, 2008, COVID) | IMF_Transition2014, Sinn2000 |
| C7 | **Ecological sustainability** | CO₂/capita (territorial + consumption caveat); resource throughput; planetary-boundary pressure | EDGAR_CO2_2023 |

Scoring is **ordinal** (configuration ranked per criterion: dominant / intermediate / dominated), with the supporting figure and its ledger key attached. No cardinal index is constructed; the structured matrix (manuscript §6) is the deliverable, consistent with the chosen narrative-with-matrix form.

## A.3 Normative weighting vectors (report the verdict under each)

| Vector | Priority | Theoretical anchor |
|---|---|---|
| W1 Efficiency/growth | C1 heavy | Friedman1962 |
| W2 Egalitarian | C2, C3 heavy | Rawls1971, Cohen2009 |
| W3 Capabilities | C3, C4 heavy | Sen1999, Nussbaum2011 |
| W4 Sustainability | C7 heavy, C1 discounted | (ecological-economics) |
| W5 Liberty | C5 heavy (both axes) | Nozick1974 |
| W6 Equal-weight baseline | all C equal | reference only — **not** privileged as "the truth" |

Method authority for multi-criteria weighting & sensitivity: Greco2016.

## A.4 Case-inclusion rules (structural, outcome-independent — frozen before data)

A case is admitted only via one of four rules, each chosen to isolate the effect of *system* from confounders. Admission does **not** depend on how the case turned out.

- **R1 — Divided-nation natural experiments.** Pairs sharing pre-split language, culture, and history, partitioned by system: **East/West Germany; North/South Korea; mainland China vs Taiwan/Hong Kong.** Closest thing to a controlled trial.
- **R2 — Transition panels (post-1989/91).** Within-country before/after, and shock-therapy vs gradualism variation: Poland, Russia, Ukraine; China's gradualism as comparator.
- **R3 — Matched cross-country comparisons.** Within development band / region, to hold resources and external environment roughly fixed: **Nordic (CSC) vs Anglo (LMC); Cuba vs Latin-American comparators.**
- **R4 — Voluntary micro-scale collective ownership.** Isolates collective ownership *absent* state coercion and *absent* price-suppression: **Mondragón; worker cooperatives; kibbutzim.**

**Confounders controlled explicitly in every comparison:** geography/resource endowment (resource curse), initial conditions, external shocks, sanctions/embargo, demographic structure, and pre-existing institutional quality (AcemogluJohnsonRobinson2001). Only what survives these is attributed to *system*.

**China handling (decision D5):** treated as a **robustness case**, not a focal case — its growth followed *market reform* (WorldBank_China2024) and its configuration is state capitalism (Milanovic2019, Naughton2018), so it informs but does not anchor the capitalism-vs-socialism comparison.

## A.5 Pre-committed anti-bias rules

1. **Symmetric evidentiary bar** — any claim favouring either family clears the same standard; asymmetric skepticism is itself flagged.
2. **Steelman-then-critique, both families** — strongest version first (Cohen2009 for socialism; Friedman1962/Hayek1945 for capitalism), then critique.
3. **No false equivalence** — equal *standards* may yield unequal *findings*; genuine asymmetries are reported, not rounded to a tie.
4. **Calculation debate engaged as a live empirical question** — Mises1920/Hayek1945 vs Lange1936/Roemer1994 vs the computational revival (DapprichCockshott2023, LambertFegley2023), not a one-liner.
5. **No-orphan-claim rule** — no sentence asserting a fact or citing a work without a ledger (Appendix B) entry.

## A.6 Pre-committed directional hypotheses (so confirmation can be checked, not assumed)

Stated before scoring, to be confirmed or overturned by the matrix:
- **H1** Market-coordinated configurations (LMC, CSC, SC) will dominate command socialism (CS) on C1, with the divided-nation pairs as the decisive evidence.
- **H2** Within capitalism, CSC will dominate LMC on C2, C3, C4, C7; LMC may lead on parts of C1 (frontier innovation) and C5b.
- **H3** Liberal-democratic configurations (LMC, CSC) will dominate all authoritarian configurations (SC, CS) on C5a.
- **H4** No configuration will be biophysically sustainable (C7) at high-income consumption levels — sustainability is a frontier *gap*, not a win for either pole.
- **H5** The global verdict will be **weight-dependent across the W1–W5 vectors but will not rehabilitate command socialism under any vector** — the live disagreement will sit on the LMC↔CSC axis, not on capitalism vs command socialism.

If the matrix contradicts these, the contradiction is reported.