Despotic rule fails because political stakes corrupt information flow

Evidence

The most fundamental reason [why despotic rulers are unable to achieve their goals] is found in the lack of reliable information. … The flaw of the system is that all acts tend to have an immediate political significance, which means that information degenerates into informing and so becomes worthless for planning purposes. Or else the information is offered that the informant believes his superiors want to hear, even if they insist on information that reflects the world as it is rather than the world as they would like it to be. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1642

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Elster’s mechanism explains why information degenerates into ‘informing’ — a precise causal account of why authority cannot gather reliable data.
• XREF: Core to reader’s thesis: collapsed observability (here through political terror rather than blindness) destroys the information substrate trust requires.

Related

• Despotic systems fail because political meaning corrupts information into sycophancy (similarity 0.90)
• Surveillance states cannot obtain reliable information because all reporting becomes politically charged (similarity 0.87)