Institutional Ambiguity as Design: Manufactured Inefficiency and the Politics of Overlap

Governments today possess unprecedented administrative capacity, yet institutional landscapes remain stubbornly fragmented - ministries duplicate mandates, regulators compete over identical jurisdictions, commissions coexist with bodies already doing their job. Conventional political science treats this overlap as accidental: the unintended residue of path dependence, coalition bargaining, or imported templates.This book argues that a specific, previously unnamed category of cases resists that account. Drawing on anti-corruption agencies, environmental regulation, migration governance, and post-communist institution-building, it shows that some overlap is manufactured - chosen when a coherent alternative was available, and preserved through active resistance to reform, because the resulting fragmentation itself generates political advantage: diffused blame, managed coalitions, accommodated elites, avoided decisive winners.Rather than competing with existing theory, the book positions its argument as a higher-order addition to it, and supplies a disciplined diagnostic protocol for distinguishing genuine manufactured inefficiency from ordinary institutional drift.The result reframes institutional dysfunction not as governance's failure, but, in identifiable cases, as one of its more successful political achievements.