Public Signals, Concealed Choices: Dynamic Measurement without Behavioral Identification

Abstract

Members of collective institutions may leave public traces while their individual choices remain concealed. This paper separates a corpus-conditional public position from the behavioral rule linking that position to participation and secret choice. I measure the first with a dynamic ordinal state-space model and establish a likelihood-exclusion result for the second. If behavioral-link parameters enter only the distribution of an entirely unobserved outcome and are a priori independent of measurement parameters, public signals leave their posterior equal to their prior. Declared monotone mappings are therefore reported as sensitivity envelopes, not estimates or identified bounds. Cabinet-sized simulations compare dynamic measurement with a static ordinal model and transparent summaries, exposing gains from temporal pooling and failures under weak measurement or omitted dimensionality. The application reconstructs 41 pre-decision official-source records preceding a concealed Slovenian cabinet decision. Only six of 21 ministers have attributable signals. The model locates a small visible group but leaves the remainder prior-dominated. Event-dependence adjustments, coding perturbations, rolling prediction, and the subsequently disclosed record support the same conclusion. Uncertainty should track the public information environment rather than be converted into unsupported behavioral precision.