Thus governments adopt regulation, taxes, and programs of compensation when the economic market ignores the costs of air pollution or the value of seat belts. But the correction is not full. Until benefits or costs become excessive, politics tilt toward special interests, with policy being shaped largely through the processes of client politics. When the balance is substantially distorted it offers opportunity for entrepreneurial politicians to mobilize broad public support by promising to redistribute benefits from the special interests to the general public. The political market differs from the economic market in being more restricted in its capacity to broker acceptable transactions.
Democratic processes require elaborate organizational overhead, in structure and time.
Political institutions can carry the burden of only a few majoritarian or entrepreneurial issues at a given time, and seldom resolve such issues quickly. Time pressures result in incomplete solutions. Political burdens result in symbolic politics of more promise than change. Professional narrowness which eschews politics and hence political understanding and skill, and professional aloofness toward the public. Professional respect and deference from the public, increasingly constrained by reactions against the aloofness.