Governance theory has quietly relied on a rough cognitive comparability between governors and governed. The assumption is load-bearing, and this paper tries to show why by making it testable. The vehicle is a six-dimension evaluation framework covering legitimacy, accountability, corrigibility, non-domination, subsidiarity, and institutional resilience, drawn from political legitimacy theory, principal-agent models, republican theory, and the AI alignment literature. The framework is first demonstrated on existing non-majoritarian institutions, where capability asymmetry is real but bounded, and then applied to a prospective case of bounded superintelligent authority, where the asymmetry is radical. Four of six dimensions show structural failures. Two of the four appear tractable to institutional design (subsidiarity scope limitation and institutional resilience). The other two, the public reason problem under cognitive incomprehensibility and the non-domination problem under permanent capability asymmetry, call for new normative theory rather than better institutional design. A further pattern emerges that governance theory has not previously had to account for. Dimensions that operate as independent checks under bounded asymmetry begin to degrade together once the asymmetry becomes radical, because each depends on the same oversight capacity. The assumptions that allowed these checks to remain independent have gone unexamined so far because they have always held.

翻译：治理理论一直悄然依赖于治理者与被治理者之间大致相当的认知可比性。这一假设至关重要，本文试图通过使其可检验来揭示其重要性。为此，我们构建了一个六维度评估框架，涵盖合法性、问责性、可修正性、非支配性、辅助性原则及制度韧性，这些维度源自政治合法性理论、委托-代理模型、共和主义理论及人工智能对齐领域的文献。该框架首先被应用于现有非多数主义机构（其中能力不对称真实存在但有限），随后被应用于一个假设的有限超级智能权威案例（其中不对称极为极端）。六个维度中有四个显示出结构性失效。其中两个维度（辅助性原则的范围限制与制度韧性）在制度设计上似乎可处理。另外两个维度——认知不可理解性下的公共理性问题与永久能力不对称下的非支配性问题——则呼唤新的规范性理论，而非更优的制度设计。此外，还出现了一个治理理论此前无需考虑的新模式：在有限不对称下作为独立制衡的维度，一旦不对称变得极端，便开始协同退化，原因在于每个维度都依赖于相同的监督能力。使得这些制衡保持独立的假设迄今未受审视，因为它们过去始终成立。