You are living in Soviet Union. Your father was sent to gulag, your mother was fired from her job in academia and sent to plow the tselina. You are being harrassed by the secret police. Then you meet a stachanovite who fulfilled the government plan to 200%. That guy is clearly a cooperator, producing more stuff you could benefit from, but you suddenly feel an irresistible urge to punch him in the nose.
I don’t fully understand the mechanism on the theoretical level myself, but it seems to have something to do with the assumptions about authority. If you assume that authority is naturally malevolent you are going to try to oppose it. “This is not my game. This is a game set up by the authorities. By those scientist guys. What can I possibly do to disrupt it?” Punishing cooperators seems to be an obvious way to do that.
Possibly related phenomena:
Lizardmen syndrome.
Boaty McBoatface syndrome.
Some kids being disruptive in school, just for disruption’s sake.
Some other stuff to look into:
Governance of Church. This may not seem like a big deal today, but in early medieval Europe, church probably had more capacity than states, so it mattered a lot. Also, catholic governance structures are quite different from protestant, from the structures in Judaism etc.
IETF has a pretty weird governance. The assumption is that anyone can join (or leave) at any moment, so the boundaries of the body politic are quite fuzzy. Thus, no voting, the stress on decision making by consensus, running code etc. Also, limited lifetime of the working groups seems to be designed to prevent concentration of power and bureacratizaton.
Open source governance models overall, from BDFL to Debian. Nadya Eghbal wrote a nice paper not 100% focused on the governance, but close.
Governance of common pool resources. Elinor Ostrom’s work is interesting here. Book review.
Governance structures in the organized crime.
Vast anthropological literature on the governance in traditional societies. (Clans, age groups etc.)
Swiss political system breaks the typical state governance patterns. Known mostly for direct democracy—but the real meat is: Any randomly assembled group of actors can get immediate political power by threatening to launch a binding, all-overriding referendum. Such groups are trpically consulted with and appeased.
Governance of international bodies.