[peyton]

The whole point of voting in my country is to serve as a check on the legislature against using the government to do things to its citizens. The ballot box isn’t a tool for societal change.

A dictatorship is a much better system for changing society, if that’s your goal for government.

[xg15]

> The ballot box isn’t a tool for societal change.

Then what is?

[fluoridation]

I mean, to a degree I agree with the GP. You can't fundamentally change a system from within the system itself. No democracy has ever turned via a series of elections into, say, a monarchy. The only way that happens is either by violent collapse (e.g. a coup or a revolution) or by gradual erosion of bureaucracy (where increasing corruption enables a few powerful individuals to seize control regardless of what the law says). The point of elections are not to make dramatic changes, but to make tweaks.

[drewcoo]

> The point of elections are not to make dramatic changes, but to make tweaks.

The point of bureaucracy is to limit change, to not allow dramatic change.

The point of democracy is to make decisions. And the larger the groups of people and the less frequently voting happens, the larger the granularity of those decisions.

Decisions should be able to change bureaucracy, add to it or subtract or realign or whatever.

When bureaucracy is used to gate-keep decisions that can be made in a democracy, it's not really democracy any more. And I think a lot of people, regardless of their political beliefs, believe that has happened: nominal democracy where votes don't really matter because they can't affect the bureaucracy.

[fluoridation]

I would say the point of bureaucracy is to make the functioning of a system consistent with some set of rules. The preservation of those rules in some specific form does not have to be part of the rules, and so does not need to be a goal of a given bureaucracy. However, a self-preserving bureaucracy can arise, either by design or accident. I would say every government that has ever existed fits that description. Can you think of a single one that has not been fundamentally conservative? "Conservative" meaning seeking to maintain the status quo that allows it to exist in its present form at any given time.