There's not much to elaborate. Democracies are run by a public structure of hired personnel whose political views are intrascendent to the matter. Often they have none. There are departments for everything, including self audit, analysis, statistics, control, etc. Whatever reaches to the political level, has already been trimmed and simplified for its signature. One rule of the public administration: don't put the political bosses in the situation to say "no". Like a law that before the voting has already been negotiated in the corridors, and everyone knows its outcome in Congress, all documents are polished so that the politics only need to approve. After years, the machine has developed a way to deal with the changes in the higher levels: don't allow them to think. If they do it, usually we are screwed. Examples: A five-yearly decision of the prioritary countries for investment is thousands of pages of reports that gets painfully trimmed commitee after commitee, to choose the "proposed" 8 or 10... Once it gets to the minister, he just needs to sign and it will become the policy for the nex 5 years. But more often than you can think, when the minister gets the list of 8, he "thinks", and decides (without reading the thousand pages, of course), that he doesn't like one of the countries, and puts another... Sometimes, because he has to visit those countries more often, and puts his personal preferences... That happens a lot. Oh, and in those circumstances the machine has to distract its usual work to find justifications for the decision... It's not easy.Charlou wrote:Would you elaborate, please, Carlos?Sisifo wrote:You'd be surprised.
It wouldn't happen much. Politics and public administration are not the same thing. Public administration isn't the most efficient machine, but it has a lot of momentum. In the real day by day practice, politicians just sign "do it" to what the machine suggests to do.
You would just eliminate demagogy...
Another example: every time a political level has a meeting, the talking points, the country's posture and the answers to the 50 most likely questions are elaborated by different strata of the machine in a similar way: starts with huge reports that get filtered and filtered up to the executive level. A rule: Never give the executive levels reports of more than 5 pages.
The only thing that the machine cannot do by itself, is changing its own programming. That programming is the laws. Give a law to the machine, and it will execute it continuously. That's why I say that in democratic countries, where the legal framework is mostly finished, and a big percentage of the new laws are just demagogics.
That's why I say that the daily life would not notice it... It probably would improve.
The problem would be when important situations come along that require a change of law. The machine cannot adapt to that...
It is then, and only then, when rulers need to take the reins. The rest of the time, the horse knows the way...
. Mine is foreign economic relationships, and few dare to try to look smart in this subject, without lots of analysts behind... 
