GAB welcomes this post by Greysa Barrientos Núñez, a Costa Rican prosecutor with 27 years’ experience investigating and prosecuting financial and corruption-related crimes. She is a member of Norway’s Corruption Hunters Network.

One of the most uncomfortable, but necessary questions in political life is not what decisions those who govern make, but why is it that they come to govern. Political scientist and academic Brian Klaas argues that the most fundamental questions of a society must be directed at who seeks power, who obtains it, and how power transforms the person who exercises it.

There are several explanations that, far from excluding one another, complement each other. One holds that power corrupts; another, that corrupt people are especially drawn to power and are often better at obtaining it; a third points to society, which tends to hand power to bad leaders for the wrong reasons; a fourth shifts the focus to systems, arguing that poorly designed institutional contexts reward the worst behaviors.

Public debate often remains on the surface, focused on scandal or the visible figure of the leader. Yet that is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it operate more dangerous structural dynamics: how candidates are selected, who is excluded, and why many capable people consider politics a toxic space they prefer to avoid.

Psychology helps explain part of the problem. Professor Dacher Keltner, from the University of California at Berkeley, describes the so-called paradox of power: the qualities that allow a person to reach leadership positions —empathy, cooperation, openness, sense of justice— tend to erode once that power is consolidated. People gain power through empathy but lose it through arrogance.

Power reduces inhibitions. Those who hold it worry less about how they affect others, take more risks, and behave like gamblers confident in their own judgment. In contrast, those without power tend to be more cautious, reactive, and fearful of losing the little they have. Thus, the imbalance deepens: the powerful gamble, while the rest try to survive.

From neurology, David Owen describes hubris syndrome, a condition associated with the exercise of power that manifests in arrogance, ideological rigidity, and exacerbated narcissism. What is relevant is that it is a transitory phenomenon: it usually reverses once the person leaves power. This reinforces a disturbing idea: it is not always about bad people, but about what unchecked power does to them.

If this is the diagnosis, the inevitable question is how to correct the problem. Klaas offers several lessons. The first is to rethink recruitment processes. Current systems favor self-nomination, which tends to attract narcissistic personalities hungry for power. Many potentially valuable leaders —in education, health, or science— never seriously consider politics. If we keep choosing from the same profiles, we will always get the same results.

The second lesson points to creating external checks, such as citizen boards or “shadow boards” that publicly analyze decisions of those in power without depending on them. Transparency and public exposure work as brakes on arbitrariness.

Another essential tool is rotation. Prolonged permanence in power generates isolation, stagnation, and corruption. Introducing new people reduces the risk of collusion and increases the likelihood of accountability. Added to this is the need to audit not only results but also decision making processes, to distinguish between good management and mere luck.

Finally, Klaas emphasizes the importance of humanizing power. When decisions are made from a distance —social, temporal, or experiential— people become abstractions. Direct contact with those who suffer the consequences of decisions introduces empathy and moral responsibility. And, ultimately, it reminds us that those who should feel observed are not the citizens, but those who exercise power.

Ultimately, the true strength of a democracy is not measured only by the quality of its institutions, but by the capacity of its citizens to question who holds power and under what conditions. If we accept without criticism that the same profiles continue to govern, we could perpetuate a cycle of disconnection from the real needs of those being governed. But if we dare to rethink selection mechanisms, demand transparency, and bring power closer to everyday human experience, we can transform politics into a more responsible space. The reflection is clear: power should not be a privilege that corrupts, but a monitored responsibility exercised in the name of all.

Power may be inevitable in complex societies. That it ends up in the hands of the worst, should not.