A political candidate runs for office on a personal platform of vision, mandate and mission of service. This becomes unconsciously reframed into a different type of mandate, invariably as soon as the politician attains office. The positive attributes of leadership are transmuted to those of dominance, and there is a retreat to the superficial realms of intelligence. The shift is very subtle, because the new mandate still retains an internal cohesion. Its keystones, however, are justifications for behaviour based on political expediency, invocation of outside forces beyond one's control, disclaiming of relevance for events that happened prior to the politician's era, and other abbrogations of full responsibility. In the process the person sheds the attributes supportive of duality within society, such as tolerance, compassion, and forgiveness.
The net result is that those in the political realm, instead of being servants and trustees to society become rulers which have lost contact with their humanity which made them attractive to electors in the first instance. There is a more or less gradual attrition in their ability to represent the dualities within the constituency, such as male/female, old/young, sick/healthy, whole/handicapped, conservative/pioneering. Politicians are therefore unable to provide to modern societies their traditional secular role of the priest/theocrat. The social liability of politicians who are unable to hold the breadth of their mandate, is that they cannot write the right laws for the future. Another consequence of such conceptual reductionism is that politicians keep occupied dealing with catastrophies.
In 1991, the prime minister of Canada maintains his right to govern with 10% of the popular vote with the statement that he was not elected to be popularly loved but to do what is right for Canada.