[zipy124]

It doesn't because their premise falls apart in democracies too. Civil servants in democracies are not elected and they have the same 'stopping power'. A planning officer in the UK could just as easily decide to arbritrarily block plans they disagree with as in an authoratian country.

[oersted]

That's not true, in a democracy you tend to have methods of appeal that actually work, and their threat keeps the wheels of bureaucracy greased.

This is because, in principle, everything comes down to the fundamental threat that the people can remove the current government, and the government does have full control over the unelected civil servants. If they keep ignoring appeals, they'll eventually get dethroned.

There's a nice symmetry between this and the fact that the law is ultimately guaranteed by the governments monopoly on violence. They can dethrone you too if you don't comply.

When a democracy works, there can be a very effective balance between the people's leverage towards the government and the governments leverage towards the people.

In an authoritarian regime the same forces are present but they are not balanced in the same way. The people can still rise up and dethrone the ruler through violence, but that is so much harder, and it is mostly offset by the governments greater power of violence. So they can get away with so much more.

[wagwang]

The US elected government has no control over the unelected civil servants as congress over the past 150 years did everything they could to prevent the spoils system.

[wwweston]

Elected officials have significant influence they can bring to bear on specific decisions, general operations, and in many cases personnel decisions. That’s true at the level of individual house members and can be more true for other offices.

The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.

I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.

[wagwang]

Executive power over the civil service is an ant driving an elephant. You can say it's a good thing and it's intentional, but the fact of the matter is that the executive appoint a fraction of a percent of the positions and those positions have nominal personnel powers that they can't really use without fear of getting sued.

[wwweston]

It's almost like positions are created and managed by law as well as leadership, and even leadership is supposed to follow law.

Fractional direct appointments are the usual case in any large organization. If you're the chief executive, you don't hire individual department workers, you might not even pick individual department management, you probably pick other "C-level" staff and have them manage management personnel most of the time.

It's more like a captain of a ship than "an ant driving an elephant." Every avenue you have to direct the ship depends on a network of knowledge and relationships supporting steering and operational systems. You don't DIY turning the tanker, you team-turn the tanker because you've learned how to work with a team.

[peyton]

I think this is completely wrong. For a democracy to form, substantially everyone must have bought in. That’s the upstream, not the threat of removal. Authoritarian “regimes” are constantly under threat of removal.

[t-3]

This is one thing many forget, mostly due to drinking our own koolaid about the inherent superiority of liberal democracy. Authoritarian regimes almost by definition have high public support, because they couldn't function at all if even a relatively small proportion of society went against them. The people who want to overthrow them are either out of the country or insignificant. Dictatorship is impossible without populism.

[greedo]

This doesn't make any sense to me. There are and have been numerous authoritarian regimes that lack "high public support", now and in the past. The entire idea for most authoritarian regimes is to slowly minimize the power of those who oppose them. And then, they spend a huge amount of resources looking for dissent (SD/Gestapo, Stasi, etc.) and trying to control the societal narrative.

[t-3]

Any government that lacks public support collapses.

Democratic governments can operate without a plurality of support for the current government, because the population generally supports and is invested in the system of government. When democratic governments fail, there is usually very little danger of violence or economic and societal instability, because there is trust in those systems. Corruption and malfeasance harms trust in the systems of governance which democracies depend upon.

Authoritarian governments depend on confidence in the government to continue functioning. The system of government isn't necessarily trusted, the workers of government aren't necessarily trusted, but the leaders are in charge and doing things. Media manipulation and effective propaganda is certainly an important tool for these governments, but pointing out that it exists doesn't mean that it doesn't work! Propaganda totally does work, by almost all measures. Russia, China, Cuba, Iran all have high domestic support for the government.

Authoritarian governments also tend to be very stable - people know what to expect. Democracies change periodically. The stability and familiarity are key to the trust that authoritarian governments maintain. The protests in Iran prior to the current conflict are a good example of what happens when a government fails to maintain the trust of the people - the arrival of war saved the current regime from falling apart at the seams when Khomeini died of cancer in a few months and a squabble for the leadership broke out amid a collapsing economy.

[greedo]

I think that you're underestimating the power of authoritarianism. For Iran, I don't think the government was in any danger prior to the war. It was capable of exerting control through the state apparatus quite easily. And look at North Korea, you think that the people under that government are supportive? That's nonsense on stilts.

Also, that collapse you refer to can take an awful long time under authoritarian control.

[mentalgear]

I fundamentally disagree. While there may be outlier cases, the core of a democracy is the separation of powers: the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative branches. If an agent within one branch violates the rules, you have the legal recourse to appeal to the others. In an authoritarian state, there is only one pillar of power - meaning there is zero recourse for citizens.

Furthermore, I’m tired of the false equivalence some people in this thread draw between the level of corruption in democracies and authoritarian regimes. They are simply not on the same scale - if you ever experienced both you would know that.

[collabs]

My guess is there is some kind of momentum with these things. If everybody demands bribes, then by not demanding bribes yourself when you are in a position to do so, you are effectively pissing away your take but remember you still need to pay bribes to everyone else because they don't care you didn't take bribes.

On the flip side, if nobody else requires bribes but you do, you will surely stick out like a sore thumb. If I don't get paid bribes and I am an influential powerful person, why should I pay you any bribes? Especially for something that is legitimate and a part of your duties?

[Gravityloss]

I am not a historian but the difference is between a society with a "rule of law" and "law of the jungle". Probably high democracy correlates with rule of law, but they are not the same thing.

[groundzeros2015]

I don’t think this is true. 20th century authoritarians made great effort to leverage the law and use legal systems.

Rule of law doesn’t address the problem of bad laws (from bad governance).

[hunterpayne]

Don't confuse having courts with rule of law. Read up in the thread, someone mentioned how important separation of powers is. I can't stress how true this idea is. In authoritarian regimes, courts are under the control of the dictator, not a separate branch who will overrule even their own political party (as just happened in the US and regularly happens all over the west).

[groundzeros2015]

The claim here was rule of law. Separation of powers is not equivalent.

[jltsiren]

Democracies are different from each other. There are many ways you can build a society from the same basic principles.

One key difference is the extent the authorities have discretionary powers. Can they do whatever the consider necessary to do their jobs (until the courts tell otherwise), or do they only have the powers explicitly given by the law? Common law systems tend to favor discretionary powers, but they vary on how eager the courts are to keep the officials in check. Civil law systems can be anywhere on the spectrum, but it's usually a legislative choice made in advance rather than a judicial choice made after the fact.

[Shitty-kitty]

Resepect for the rule of law is whats important. In Singapore you can sue the government, same as in the U.S Try to do that in China and the only thing that's going to happen, is you being sent a a reducation camp.

[newyankee]

Civil Servants in India (with traces to British era) are considered the invisible rulers of the country. Getting selected is like becoming a local lord.

[pjc50]

This is why so much planning gets decided in judicial review.

[thighbaugh]

More easily because in a democratic society there is absolutely no risk of having something like that come out and the need for the autocrat to save face and jealously assert the civil servant acted outside of the will of the autocrat thus behead the arbitrary civil servant to cheering crowds according to popular demand.

At worst the person gets fired and is prohibited from public sector jobs at that tier of government afterwards for a period of time while the story is fresh in peoples minds, in the rare case the plutocratic owned media let's such a story come out of its mass media products about the not-paid-for bureaucratic elements of government in hopes of reducing polarization that comes from over-promoting one of the arbitrarily different parties as a means of providing the commoners what Orwell called "Two Minutes Hate" or a means of obtaining cathartic release from the tensions that making them believe they are somehow co-authors of the government to keep them engaged as willing participants.

[hunterpayne]

"providing the commoners what Orwell called "Two Minutes Hate" or a means of obtaining cathartic release from the tensions that making them believe they are somehow co-authors of the government to keep them engaged as willing participants."

This explains the current state of US mass media so well...

[dzonga]

this is the uncomfortable truth people are unwilling to accept.

can democratic societies be corrupt, can autocratic societies be not corrupt this is also true.

accept things as they're, not as they ought to be - one of the fundamental lessons one has to learn to operate in this world.

[dmytrish]

That does not mean that "things as they are" is "how it's ought to be".

[groundzeros2015]

The culture and trust of the people makes the system work or fail, not the system itself.

[walthamstow]

A planning officer, who happens to share an uncommon surname with the local MP, did just that with an application of mine recently. No site visit, no photos, no respect to the law, just NO.

[onraglanroad]

That provides an easy solution: complain to your MP. At length. And then ask if the planning officer happens to be a relative, as though it has just occurred to you.

And then you might consider talking to the local paper to see if it would make a story. Also the crapper tabloids might even pay for the story.