or… this is the result of cut-cut-cut politics. When we continue to cut funding, while asking our govt workers to do more, of course the quality of service is going to suffer. This isn't a problem in other countries.
Having seen the sausage made in a few different government bureaucracies, I'm fairly confident this is not the case. It all comes down to whether there is any incentive to improve customer experience.
I'm sure a lot of Germans on here would like to tell you about the hell that is the German bureaucracy. While it works, it can just be a nightmare of forms and millions of rules.
Footnote: Feliks Koneczny has an interesting analysis of why Germany is like this. He classifies Germany as belonging predominantly to what he calles Byzantine civilization (I'll leave it up to the interested to find out how he classifies civilizations), tracing it to the influence of Empress Theophanu. At the time he published his works, he took Bismarck's Germany as the quintessence of Byzantine Germany.
