(02-07-2018, 08:54 AM)Kris Kringle Wrote: Do you believe there is a danger that appointed "advisory councils", which were originally envisioned to be councils of elders, rather than policy drivers, might be replacing the elected Cabinet as the main executive decision making bodies in the region?

Yes and no.

If we're going to refer to the Advisory Council, the FA Team, and the General Corps by a single name, "advisory council" is not a fitting name. So let's just say that all of these are the board of the respective ministry.

Each ministry has its own board with its own operating paradigm. These are each quite different from another, but that isn't a bad thing. The boards are established in a way that works best for that particular ministry, and what is important is that the general hierarchy (with the Cabinet at the top giving the general direction and the boards/ministries implementing that) is upheld. This has been generally true. To answer your question, however, we need to look at each board.

In RA, the Advisory Council has been, and continues to be, a council of elders as you say, advising the minister in the running of the ministry. They're not setting executive policy, and I see no danger there.

In the military, the situation is somewhat different. The Generals are supposed to be the elite gameplayers actually running the SPSF. The minister serves rather as oversight and Cabinet liaison for the generals, whilst also assisting them in civilian matters (in practice the MoMA has generally been a SPSF member as well so far, but that's not strictly required). So yes, for the military, the board actually is more of a policy driver, though this is by design and it should be noted that the direction that the Cabinet needs to give the military is minimal; in most cases, the directive is basically "make sure we have good troops", though obviously on the occasion when we have some foreign policy objective to fulfill elsewhere, the GC is directed by the Cabinet accordingly. I see no danger here either.

Now, the Foreign Affairs ministry is the potentially dangerous one. The FA Team was established under Escade initially as a sort of advisory council like in RA, but quickly and organically developed to be more as a proactive team that is appointed and overseen by the minister and operates mostly on a consensus-based model. The potential danger comes when the general foreign policy direction is not set by the elected Cabinet as a whole and implemented by the FA team, but rather dictated by the appointed FA team. This can be exasperated by a situation like we have now, where 3/4 of the Cabinet are on that FA team. While I wouldn't say this has happened yet, it has come close.

To see how I'm working against this — see my answer to Seraph's question (presumably that question and its answer triggered this question anyway).