Rotten politicians and leaders are not because of any lacking in some "system", it is because you have a rotten people. And getting people to a higher level is very difficult, but not impossible.
It's of course true that if the people don't support the system they can overthrow it, like Maost China, Tsarist Russia, Revolutionary USA, and closer to home here in Sweden we have had several total rewrites of the constitution. So at the very bottom the people have to accept the system to some degree.
But all this doesn't mean the system doesn't influence behavior. It does. A LOT. Just go into Reddit with the up/down vote system with publicly viewable vote counts on each comment and see what that does to the debate climate. It's bad!
The system itself shapes what people can rise to the top. Of course it does. It sets the rules and is (as an emergent entity) more powerful than any individual in the system.
This is why people who know things about social systems talk about “systemic issues”.
Terry Pratchett.
Without internal tool building, people bend their workflow to suit the tools, have second tier support if any, the tool has no empathy on your particular business context, close to or no involvement on roadmap. But hey, at least less complaint from the people, I mean the colleague
My biggest problem has always been that users are used to software being "Stone Tablets from the Mountain" and so instinctively work around the tool instead of just asking me to fix it. Which is reasonable mostly since almost all the software they (and me!) have ever used is very much like this.
This isn't only a discussion about software though, but about government. The citizens don't even report problems because they assume they will be ignored. So the government stops listening because there is nothing to listen to. Round and round it goes.
Brexit is a good example. It is not always framed in those terms, but it is a significant constitutional change (it removed a legislative body, removed a layer of judiciary, and a lot more) that happened despite the vast majority of politicians opposing it.
Of course it is controversial and those opposed to it often argue that we should not allow "the people" that much power because they are too foolish to have it - but then that power shifts to politicians and bureaucrats.
A voting system that aspires to boost uncorrelated signals, and attenuate highly correlated signals. Said another way, ideas with more support from a diversity of otherwise non-agreeing parties gets it's voting power boosted. So plurality wins. Convergence of knowledge from different sources of truth, that wins too.
And a group that's very similar to itself, voting one way, that gets de-voiced. Which is appropriate, because it's not interesting and not a dynamic agreement, and says nothing about deeper underlying unity and truth. Agreement across difference means there's something powerful going on, so we want that signal elevated
So the system converges to a suck-state.
However, I see it is downvoted without replies. What have I missed?
But I do think it's possible to have change. I am an optimist. But first we need to try different things on a smaller scale. Municipalities is a good level.