Quote Originally Posted by Korrigan View Post
I didn't know your famous english sense of humor which I am fond of had room in politics too

Actually, different systems interest me a lot for the world I'm building... One of the countries in it discovered democracy recently and I realize that the system I created looks a lot like yours !

But considering what you were saying about short-time view in politics, we have pretty much the same problem here. Federal elections are every 4 years, regional elections every 5 and local elections every 6... Make the count and you'll see that we vote close from every year... Which greatly limits political courage at every level of power... But I have no miracle solution to counter that, especially since I see other democratic systems face the same problems...

I'd be curious to discover how things work in Australia or South-Africa...
I think the time horizon is an ever-present problem of representative democracies. If the time between elections is too short, the representatives are given to focusing exclusively on the next election cycle. They are constantly in election-campaign mode, and never focused on actually getting anything done. Too long, and the representative stays in power so long that they stop caring what the constituent public thinks or cares about, and becomes influencable primarily by financially powerful special interests. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an equilibrium point between the two extremes, as somewhere around the middle, the two problems start to overlap a little, and then you have to deal with corruption from two directions at once! It takes some serious moral integrity to overcome these twin pitfalls...