Political-institutional frameworks address the consequences of systemic transactional practices on democratic erosion. Research by Kitschelt and Wilkinson (2007) shows that persistent vote buying undermines institutional accountability, weakens citizen-legislator trust, and can ultimately lead to the consolidation of power in elite hands, setting the stage for authoritarian drift. Other studies underscore the feedback loop: repeated transactional interactions reinforce citizen cynicism, normalize political corruption, and reduce participation in civic processes.
Despite the richness of these prior models, gaps remain. Most models focus on single-dimensional explanations---rational choice, institutional weakness, or clientelist networks---without integrating psychological mechanisms, social labeling, cultural normalization, and systemic feedbacks into a unified framework. Moreover, few models offer formal mathematical or computational representations capable of predicting thresholds or bifurcations between democratic stability, authoritarian tendencies, or social unrest.
This gap motivates the present study, which seeks to synthesize psychological, sociological, and political-institutional insights into a multi-level Transactional Degradation of Democracy (TDD) framework. By combining theory-driven qualitative analysis with formal mathematical modeling, the TDD approach aims to capture not only the micro-level rationalizations and identity processes of voters and politicians but also the macro-level cultural and systemic consequences of transactional politics.
III. Theoretical Framework
A. Definition of Transactional Degradation of Democracy (TDD)
The Transactional Degradation of Democracy (TDD) framework conceptualizes a process by which democratic institutions, norms, and legitimacy progressively erode due to the normalization of transactional political behavior. Transactional behavior, in this context, refers to interactions between citizens and political representatives that are primarily motivated by material exchange rather than normative or civic considerations. These exchanges include vote buying, clientelist favoritism, and other forms of conditional political support that substitute transactional incentives for ethical or ideological alignment.
TDD builds upon the integration of five theoretical lenses---social exchange, labeling, cognitive dissonance, alienation, and symbolic domination---to capture the multi-level mechanisms driving political degradation. At the micro-level, individual voters rationalize accepting monetary incentives through cognitive dissonance and internalization of social labels. Legislators reciprocally adjust their behavior, justifying negligence or arrogance in office as a response to transactional compliance from the electorate.
At the meso- and macro-levels, repeated transactional interactions collectively produce alienation, eroding citizens' sense of agency, solidarity, and attachment to democratic processes. Simultaneously, symbolic domination normalizes and legitimizes these interactions culturally, reinforcing a social narrative that treats transactional politics as pragmatic or natural. This dynamic is self-reinforcing, creating a feedback loop whereby micro-level rationalizations perpetuate systemic degradation.
Formally, TDD can be represented as a multi-level causal system:
\text{TDD} = F(\text{Micro-rationalization}, \text{Social Labeling}, \text{Cognitive Dissonance}, \text{Alienation}, \text{Symbolic Domination})
Where:
