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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

> I always wonder why many democracies devolve into politicians just looting

I am very concerned that US/UK appear to be decolving for the last 10 years. The standards of acceptable behaviour from politicians have definately gone down.

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I am somewhat optimistic about the UK situation; in the end, Boris was at least held accountable, and by his own party. It was too late, and he got away with far too much in my opinion, but in the end a line was drawn and was told to bugger off. Incidents with "colourful" PMs are not unheard off, e.g. Churchill was widely criticised for various antics which are not all that dissimilar to Boris' antics. This of course ended up being overshadowed by his status as the war PM.

In the US the situation is quite a bit more dire, and roots of the current situation are also quite a bit deeper and go back longer beyond just "this asshole got elected to office".

it's all from the property of parliamentary systems that the leader can be removed easily

presidental systems are really quite awful in practice

I actually think that's a comparatively minor detail, and not all that important here. The biggest issue that has often been discussed is the first past the post constituencies/districts/states both systems share. Neither Trump nor Boris would have become President or PM without that, simply on account of voters having more options to cast a meaningful vote for (UK also does a little bit better than the US in this regard).

it's the important detail

in the UK the electorate don't pick the leader

the electorate vote for an MP, and the group of those that form the party alone select the leader (and they can dismiss them just as easily)

the party has power over the leader, which is absolutely not true in most presidential systems

(and as to your second point, yes, under some hypothetical system that doesn't exist it's possible things may be different)

May just be more obvious. Some of the scammers look to have been doing it for decades.

True. But the politicians who are scammers (not all are) seem to be much more brazen about it. And I can't help but feel that the public failing to hold them accountable is exacerbating and accelerating the situation.

I think that once you get to the point that "all politicians lie/cheat/steal" is a widely accepted truism, the system is pretty much doomed.

Perhaps but at least in Australia there's still a sense that politicians can't just get away with whatever they feel works for them. There's a big kerfuffle currently about the fact our previous prime minister secretly had himself sworn into multiple ministerial roles without consulting anyone else in his own party. The curious thing to me is that so far there's no evidence he did so for any personal gain or made improper use of ministerial privileges. But he's still rightfully being grilled over it and there's a decent chance he'll be forced to step down from his role as a member of the opposition. And the various YouTube videos mocking him have been hilarious (for anyone familiar with how he was in office the last 5 years).

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