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Is there something special about "the institutions" or does it have more to do with the people themselves? Both what citizens will tolerate and what politicians
by majormajor 6y ago
Is there something special about "the institutions" or does it have more to do with the people themselves? Both what citizens will tolerate and what politicians will try to get away with?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoYes, both. You need institutions strong enough to, for example, stop a president that exceeds his authority. But you need people who make the institutions do what they're supposed to do.
- tsimionescu 6y agoInstitutions (strong ones, the ones that really work) have a way of transcending the desires of their members. An functioning institution won't stop functioning because of a few members with un aligned goals - this is similar to the way distributed systems are deigned, where you want to have redundancy and a quorum to ensure that the cluster survives network partitions and problems with the leader node. Of course, an institution won't survive a certain percentage of its members being malign. The stronger the institution, the larger that number is. To give some ideas of the mechanisms that make this possible, internal reviews are one of the most powerful forces for making sure that rules established yesterday are still respected by people who join tomorrow, even at the very top.