When Bread Rebinds: A Leontief Theory of Symbolic Mandate Exhaustion

Abstract

This paper develops a theory of symbolic mandate exhaustion. Voters require both material security, or bread, and social meaning, and the two are poor substitutes near important social baselines. Welfare is therefore governed by the weaker side of the bread-and-meaning pair. When meaning is initially binding, a political movement can raise welfare by supplying recognition, dignity, identity validation, and narrative repair.

Credible political entry, however, requires more than a marginal symbolic adjustment. A challenger must provide a minimum viable symbolic package large enough to be read as a distinct political type. Conditional on entry, the movement supplies this package and then allocates remaining capacity toward material delivery. If the resulting allocation leaves bread below repaired meaning, the binding constraint switches from meaning to bread. At that point, further symbolic supply has zero marginal welfare value in the Leontief limit and sharply diminished value under low-substitution preferences. The movement’s symbolic mandate is exhausted unless recognition can be converted into reconstruction. A reference-dependent extension shows when exhaustion of the instrument becomes outright support decay.

Keywords: symbolic politics, material security, recognition, populism, Leontief preferences, mandate exhaustion

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