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Comment by VoxPelli | Hacker News Reader

As a Swede it feels so weird to read about eg. Trump meddling in such details in affairs like this.

In Sweden ministerial rule is outlawed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerial_governance

Our prime minister would not be allowed to have an opinion on any specific case like this, he would rather have to have opinions on the overall legal framework or such instead and leave the interpretation and application of the legal framework to the appropriate agencies.

To me that feels like the right way to go about things like this.

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I believe youre seeing an artifact of how governance is divided. It looks like sweden (and many other parliamentary systems) puts the administration & execution of law under the direction of a minister, who’s primarily a legislator.

In the USA these areas are more clearly divided. The federal legislature is comprised of a bicameral house and senate. There is a discrete executive branch charged with enforcing the law set by the legislature. The president is the head of that executive branch who enforces those laws. Thats where the aspect of specific enforcement by the president comes in.

That separation exists in Sweden as well. The parliament makes the laws while the government is the executive branch.

But yeah, slightly different as its our prime minister who sets up the government, the parliament who picks the prime minister and the people who elects the parliament – through proportional representation.

The ban on ministerial rule is an additional separation on top of the one you mention – a separation within the executive branch, that even further avoids opportunities for eg. corruption. (And confuses foreign leaders who are unfamiliar with it)

The other factor is likely the US's general lack of a professional civil service leadership. The leadership of the US civil service is largely appointed, en masse, by the new president every four to eight years. This is unusual in other developed democracies; there usually is a mechanism for the executive or legislature to get rid of senior civil service officials, but doing so is controversial, very visible, and not routine.

The US has always suffered from an extremely politicised administrative body, the extreme powers given to the president are an example of this, but in many other ways there is a lack of administrative independence as well, you can just look at all the diplomatic vanity appointments of the administration.

In pretty much every other functioning democracy diplomats and heads of agencies are trained, in the US these posts get handed out like candy to however throws the president an election party.

This is not typical in America, either, the last four years have been exceptional for a number of well-documented reasons.

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