These types of legal shenanigans, sadly, usually work; Politicians just keep attempting to pass the same provisions in different forms with slightly different language over a period of years until they slip, whatever it is, through.
Are you sure you aren’t proxying something else for size? Plenty of local politics in America, for example, is plenty despotic.
Larger groups are more consistent, they all have “bureaucratic” problems. One of these problems is too much happening and not enough (moral and competent) oversight*. Hence text sneaked into government bills, funds embezzled from big companies, etc.
* Ironically as other commenters point out, this text isn’t avoiding discovery, because the bill is public and there are enough concerned citizens to provide the necessary oversight. A better example is government contracts, if they were published and voted on like bills I suspect contractors would be way better (except they’d be more political unless we solve that…)
I'd guess the opposite. As evidence I present CEO pay, which went up with more transparency.
I like the idea of making public contracts searchable. But absent controls it will just lead to the partisan poisoning and context-free excerpting that characterises our low-brow political discourse.
In armed conflict, having a large polity can pay off — big time — while having a small one can be fatal. To name just a few examples: Belgium 1914 and 1940; (the Scandanavian) Norway and Denmark 1940; Tibet 1950; Kuwait 1990; and Chechnya 1999-2000.