Mapping the Narrow Corridor with Large Language Models

Abstract

Acemoglu and Robinson (2024 Nobel laureates in Economics) trace national histories in The Narrow Corridor as paths through a two-dimensional (state power, society power) space but plot none: quantifying the two axes at each moment is the labor-intensive, judgment-laden task that has kept the framework qualitative. We ask whether large language models (LLMs) can operationalize it. We introduce a reproducible, provider-agnostic pipeline that scores a country period by period using chain-of-thought (events first, then score) and in-context anchoring on prior periods, against an explicit rubric with schema-validated output. As a proof of concept we produce a twelve-country trajectory atlas (Iran, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Chile, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Zambia, Somalia, and India), chosen to place at least two countries in each of the book's four Leviathan types, and compare four models. We assess the scores for consistency with an expert index (V-Dem) and for inter-model agreement, reading agreement as concurrent consistency rather than accuracy, since such indices likely appear in the models' training data, and discuss conceptually how the biases of an LLM annotator and a human expert differ. Code, prompts, runs, and an interactive gallery of the animated trajectories are released.