[jkingsbery]

"For some weird and unexplainable reason, people normally expect better services from private companies than from their own governments."

Right or wrong, it's not that unexplainable. People leave their cell phone carrier over bad customer service. They buy their things from a different website because of poor service, or go to a different store. It's cheap to change your allegiance to a different brand. It's a lot more expensive to change your allegiance to a different government. Governments in most places in the world have little incentive to improve.

Governments and private companies are both institutions, they just face different incentive structures. Governments aren't somehow magically protected from the people that run them having incentives.

[disordinary]

Surely democracy is an incentive to improve.

[jkingsbery]

I would partially agree with that. An elected official has incentive to remain popular, or a challenger will win the next election. But in the US, much (most?) of the "government" is non-elected bureaucracy that doesn't even change with a change in the party in control.