>>4181
>Which forms of government are more likely to "go bad."
Democracies the most likely, republics ever-so-slightly less so, limited suffrage less than that, monarchies least of all (presuming we are limiting ourselves to governments themselves and not stateless societies). They all go bad over time, but the more monarchical the government the slower the process is.
>Why?
It's a matter of incentives. A democratic ruler does not own his nation, he is only the steward of its income and products for a limited period of time. As such, he is incentivized to maximize present production and current conditions, even if they come at the expense of a very dear productivity in the future. Further, because he is put into power by the whims of the lowest common denominator, he is incentivized to throw welfare and a few kickbacks to whatever faction of voters put him into power to ensure that they will vote for him again. He will happily drain the treasuries and tax the people far beyond the point of sustainability, even in full knowledge that these policies will cost 'the people' far more than they're receiving in the long run. Because by the time "long run" comes around after all, someone else will be in office. And that next person will campaign on fixing his predecessor's problems with the same manner of band-aid policy, passing his problems further to the next person. And so it continues, the productive and prudent getting more burdened and the carefree degenerates getting rewarded until the culture is destroyed and productivity has been brought to a standstill.
A monarch by contrast sees the realm as private property. He does not merely have control over its current output, he has true ownership of the output and all of the productive capital for his entire life, and he will bequeath it to his children. He has full knowledge of the deleterious effects of too much intrusion into the livelihood of his subjects, and will tax less, secure in the knowledge that his decision to plunder less now will cause the economy and productivity to grow quicker, allowing him to plunder more in the future. As such, he is incentivized to maximize the long-term robustness of his realm, and without the prospect of elections, he has no need to buy public approval with slap-dash policies and expensive stunts. He can think in the long-term and make plans accordingly; in other words, he has a low time-preference.
Further, in addition to all of these generic incentives based on time-preference, I think it's fair to say that a democracy promotes leaders with bad character more than monarchy does. In monarchy, it's more or less a crapshoot whether the king is born a good man or a bad one although his years of upbringing can influence that, let's give democracy a sporting chance and rule out that influence. But in democracy, the electoral system actively encourages poor behavior. The amoral sociopath is far more likely to succeed on the campaign trail than the honest man, able to constantly lie through his teeth to the masses, promising everyone a turn at the government teat.
>When a government goes bad, how bad are they likely to get relative to each other?
Like I implied above, the more democratic a country is the faster the rate of deterioration is. However, I think it can be argued that the threshold for how "bad" a country becomes before some sort of regime change occurs is lower in a monarchy than it is in democracy. It doesn't take all that much effort, all things considered, to replace a bad monarch with a good one. But once a democracy has reached its worst stages, there's no one man that can be assassinated and replaced, not even one group of people. The spirit of government has been diluted into a vast multitude of bureaucracies and agencies, all of which have been molded for years by democratic influence, and it's so ingrained into every employee that there's no practical way to get it out. Short of waiting for the whole thing to implode all on its own, secession is the only viable form of protest against a democracy that has reached this state.