Governance theory presupposes a rough cognitive comparability between governors and governed. This paper makes that assumption explicit and testable through 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. The analysis also finds that dimensions which operate as independent checks under bounded asymmetry begin to degrade together under radical asymmetry, 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：治理理论预设治理者与被治理者之间存在一种粗略的认知可比性。本文通过构建一个涵盖合法性、问责性、可纠正性、非支配性、辅助性与制度韧性的六维度评估框架，将这一假设显性化并使之可检验，该框架融合了政治合法性理论、委托-代理模型、共和主义理论及AI对齐研究。首先以现有非多数主义机构为对象验证该框架——这些机构中能力不对称真实存在但有限——随后将其应用于一个假定案例：有限的超级智能权威，其中能力不对称呈现激进特征。六个维度中，四个出现结构性失效。其中两个（辅助性范围限制与制度韧性）似乎可通过制度设计解决；另两个——认知不可理解下的公共理性问题与永久性能力不对称下的非支配问题——则需要新的规范性理论，而非更好的制度设计。分析还发现，在有限不对称条件下作为独立制衡的维度，在激进不对称下开始共同退化，原因在于每个维度都依赖于相同的监督能力。由于这些制衡机制赖以保持独立的假设一直成立，此前从未受到审视。