Methodology
The framework, editorial standards, importance scale, and capture-lane taxonomy used to classify every event in the archive.
The Cascade Ledger is built on a small number of editorial commitments and a single explanatory framework. This page describes both. For the citation rules that govern what counts as a usable source, see the source tiers.
The Capture Cascade framework
Democracy doesn’t fall gradually — it cascades. Each captured institution lowers the cost of capturing the next, producing exponential rather than linear acceleration. The archive is organized around five reinforcing stages:
- Capture oversight — neutralize the inspectors general, ethics offices, and audit functions whose job is to see clearly.
- Capture courts — narrow legal recourse, normalize delay, and reshape the bench so that adverse rulings become rare.
- Capture enforcement — convert prosecutorial discretion and police authority into selective tools.
- Capture media — degrade the channels by which the public would otherwise learn what was done in its name.
- Cascade accelerates — each captured institution enables three more, and the velocity of further capture rises.
The framework is descriptive, not predictive. It is a way of seeing relationships between events that the daily news cycle is structurally unable to draw.
Capture lanes
Every event is assigned one or more capture lanes — categorical taxonomies of mechanism rather than topic. Lanes include judicial capture, regulatory capture, surveillance and detention infrastructure, financial-system capture, information-environment capture, and others. Lanes let a reader follow a single mechanism across decades and administrations rather than reading the timeline only chronologically. The full list is browsable at /lanes/.
Editorial standards
Every entry in the archive must meet four criteria:
- Credible sourcing — court records, official documents, or verified reporting from established outlets.
- Verifiable documentation — sources are linked and can be independently checked.
- Clear significance — the entry explains why the event matters to democratic institutions.
- Proper context — the event connects to broader patterns of institutional capture.
If we make a mistake, we correct it transparently. The entire dataset is version-controlled in git, and every change is part of the public record. See contribute for the correction process.
Importance score (1–10)
Each event carries an editorial importance score on a 1–10 scale. The scale is comparative rather than absolute: a 10 is reserved for events of structural, generational consequence (a sitting president pardoning officials convicted of crimes connected to the office; a Supreme Court decision rewriting the constitutional balance of power). A 5 is the working median — a documented, sourced event with clear pattern relevance. Scores below 3 are typically used for context entries that anchor a longer arc.
Importance is set by the editor at entry time and may be revised as later events recontextualize earlier ones. The score is editorial, not algorithmic; we publish it because hiding it would not make it disappear.
Editorial status
Every event carries one of four status values:
- Confirmed — verified by multiple credible sources, or grounded in a primary document (court filing, official record).
- Reported — single credible source, awaiting corroboration.
- Alleged — under investigation; documented allegation rather than established fact.
- Disputed — contested claims, retained for transparency where the dispute itself is part of the record.
The default is confirmed. If an event is in the timeline without a qualifier, the sourcing supports it.