Dr. Andraž Teršek
Institute Constitutionalist – Law Institute Dr. Andraž Teršek
Kamnik, January 2026
Abstract:
The recruitment system for the highest public offices has devolved into a so-called “dead technocracy,” where key substantive competencies, intellectual sovereignty, and moral integrity are sacrificed at the altar of purely formalistic procedures and administrative minimalism. Instead of a meritocracy based on a reasonable and critical assessment of candidates, the “bozo effect” (negative selection) prevails, in which average decision-makers deliberately select average candidates for the highest public positions who lack substance, as they perceive top-tier knowledge, integrity, and authority derived from substance as a risk and a form of “unmanageability.” In this process, the Office of the President of the Republic and the National Assembly function merely as technical services or “mailboxes,” while the Constitutional Court fails to recognize such degradation as a significant issue and problem of constitutionality, thereby hollowing out the state’s constitutional substance and replacing it with bare formal legalism. Such a state of affairs signifies not only a loss of authority and integrity of institutions, which now operate only as bare power, but also a direct violation of the spirit of the constitution, as the constitutional order is reduced to political bartering and the administration of certificates, leading to the systemic collapse of the state’s constitutional integrity, constitutional consciousness, and constitutional thought.
Keywords:
Dead technocracy; constitutional substance; bare formal legalism; bare power without authority and integrity; prevention of meritocracy; negative personnel selection; “bozo effect.”
It happens very rarely that anyone publicly pokes into one of the most important elements of the process and functioning of the system for selecting personnel for the highest positions or institutional roles – public functions. Even an averagely reasonable person would logically conclude that public functions (e.g., President of the State, Prime Minister, Minister, Constitutional Judge, Ombudsman…) demand the highest level of responsibility and professional competence. This should be a matter of legitimate expectation. All procedures carried out before the appointment of a specific person to a public function should follow this principle and this ethics.
Competencies, which are multilayered and multidimensional (if reduced merely to a dichotomy of “formal” and “substantive”), should be sought, required, critically and empoweredly assessed, indisputably and optimally convincingly demonstrated, provable, and proven. In accordance with the philosophy of meritocracy. This simultaneously means respecting all fundamental principles and concepts of a democratic society, based on the rule of law as the rule of reason, the quality of content, and the moral justification of legitimacy.
But the system does not work that way. It involves purely formal procedures. The former is the path to and assurance of genuine intellectual sovereignty, personal integrity, and professional skills—namely, substance. The latter is the path to and continuation of BARE TECHNOCRACY or DEAD TECHNOCRACY, where formal “certificates” (completed school, diploma, master’s degree, doctorate, recommendation…) and political agreements are enough for staffing.
But it is not just that they are “enough.” The point is that this is actually the central, leading criterion – administrative minimalism. In all such cases, of course, it is not a question of the existence of an individual’s “right to a function”. That does not exist. It is a question/problem of the right to a substantive, transparent, and rational assessment—a meritorious analysis that would prevent the selection process from devolving into a “dead technocracy,” where instead of doctrinal, conceptual, intellectual, and professional eminence, fast, simple, and in that sense “safe” choices are sought for daily politics.
This is carried out for the purpose of appointing people with profiles who, instead of being eminences (or even personalities at the level of a professional “institution”), are sought-after, targeted, and, regarding the expected quality of future work in the function, sufficiently unobtrusive bureaucratic profiles. Through negative selection, the system rewards mediocrity. Therefore, it sees an unacceptable risk in general intelligence, top-tier knowledge, and sovereign thinking, which are necessary for the excellent performance of a public function. There is also a fear of the “unmanageability” of an individual’s personality, moral integrity, and intellectual sovereignty. This is unacceptable for the system. This in itself does not belong to purely administrative and technocratic procedures.
The emphasis, the core of the problem, lies in the systematization and policy (in the sense of the method of implementation) of the candidacy process, the possibilities and significance of the presentation, the primary selection of the candidate by the President of the Republic, and the final selection by voting in the National Assembly of the RS. In all these processes, one would search in vain for “equality of arms,” “equality of treatment and evaluations,” or the “absence of double discrimination”—substantive and pro forma.
Unfortunately, even the Slovenian Constitutional Court does not recognize or acknowledge this as an “important legal issue” that exceeds the interest of the individual, let alone as an “important question of constitutionality”—of substance, which is primarily a legal category and only then a political circumstance or a problematic element of the daily-political environment. For me personally (and I am by no means alone in this), all of this IS a fundamental “legal” and “constitutional law” question.
This is by no means just a question or problem of systemic legitimacy and the understanding of the legal optics within which the procedural staffing system operates. The problem of the irreconcilable gap between “bare legalism,” the “policy of certificates,” and “dead technocracy” on one side, and “constitutional substance” (as a factor of merit-based selection) on the other, is systemically irreconcilable. And set in stone. The failure to conduct a diligent and persuasive analytical-substantive assessment IS a question of constitutional substance.
If the Office of the President of the Republic of Slovenia, as the primary personnel filter, acts only as a “mailbox” and a technocratic conveyor belt, and the National Assembly of the RS acts only as a voting machine without credible substantive debate, the constitutional substance is excommunicated and nullified. When institutions such as the President of the Republic and the National Assembly abandon the comparative analysis of offered content, they de facto and de jure neutralize the role of the institution as an arbiter of power. Into such a constructed twilight of dead technocracy, a ray of light can enter only by great coincidence.
What the law in these processes calls “political discretion” is not a matter of unlimitedness. In other words: it must not be unlimited and must not be understood or treated as unlimited. But in reality, in practice, it is exactly like that. Moreover, there is no institutional oversight over the fact that it is so. Primarily because for the courts this is not a legal question, and for the Constitutional Court, this is not a question of constitutionality.
If the process of selection and the final choice of a specific candidate is reduced to mere political bartering (haggling), even the judicial branch of power, including the Constitutional Court, remains only as a technical service for confirming bare-formalistic legality, or “bare-legalistic literalism”: dealing with the formalism of the letters that form sentences, but not with the substance.
In theory and practice, there is something called the “Bozo effect/impact/consequence”. Originally the “Bozo explosion”. The most established and cited name for the logic of the “Bozo explosion” is: “A’s hire A’s (and A+’s), B’s hire C’s (and D’s), C’s hire D’s etc.”. It is a process, a characteristic of a qualified majority of the functioning of individuals and social systems, which nullifies the principle of meritocracy with the “Bozo effect”. This principle, allegedly by Steve Jobs / Guy Kawasaki (who supposedly summarized it), is mentioned in Silicon Valley and among startups almost as a proverb.
If an A or A+ player notices this at the beginning, as a fact or an indication, they always know where the continuation will lead and what the conclusion will be. It is impossible anywhere not to notice this or not to know it in advance. In cross-section, it is therefore completely pointless for an A-player to even apply for a prestigious function if they do not have a prior guarantee that they will be appointed to it. This, however, cannot happen to an A-player without at least one condition, which is personally and character-wise unacceptable to them, and which they would have to fulfill for that purpose.
And because they are an A-player, they refuse fulfillment. In this process of anti-meritocracy, adolescent ego, pathological narcissism (including malignant), and megalomania syndrome then prevail. Occasional attempts to guard and protect the legitimacy of a certain institution and its “substantive backbone,” which should be the fervent core of the function, fail time and again. The consequence is, of course, the degradation of the institution. Such an institution can only exist as BARE POWER, but it cannot mean POWER BASED ON AUTHORITY – AND INTEGRITY.
This is a fundamental question of substantive legitimacy. Or rather, a general problem of a lack of legitimacy. Constitutional democracy has thus evaporated and watered down. Without a built constitutional backbone, constitutional consciousness and constitutional thought quietly vanish. A state has been established where either a constitutional judge or an ombudsman or an ambassador or a judge… can become anyone who has either been in the official hierarchy long enough or is, due to a lack of substance, unobtrusive, non-dangerous, and causes no concern—especially no fear—because of the power of the function established by authority and integrity.
This is precisely the reasonably elaborated point where a triple failure of constitutional responsibility is revealed. If even the Constitutional Court rejects the meritorious, substantive consideration of such cases (via a constitutional appeal) as an “inappropriate subject for review,” it thereby confirms the thesis that it is becoming merely an administrative actor, predominantly issuing purely administrative acts. A judge or an ombudsman becomes a mere official processing files along the line of least intellectual effort (and thus without “resistance” to the system). They act as a non-problematic element of the system, without actually supervising, reminding, correcting, or resisting it in any way—with the power of a function based on the authority and integrity of substance.
Therefore, these questions as constitutional questions are fenced off behind procedural walls, and the Constitutional Court is far from being a “secular institution of legal justice”. The protection of bare-bureaucratic profiles is the cellular structure of the existing system. Because constitutional judges have also become officials who, instead of constitutional values, predominantly and in a strongly prevailing scope only process formal-legalistic decisions, there is no effective oversight and limitation of political discretion—which placed them in the position in the first place.
The constitutional integrity of the state thereby collapses. The constitutional backbone of the system evaporates; only machines for technocratic confirmations and rejections remain. Alongside this, it should not be forgotten that the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia, in Article 104 (Oath of the President of the Republic), stipulates: “Before taking office, the President of the Republic shall take the following oath before the National Assembly: ‘I swear that I will respect the constitutional order, that I will act according to my conscience and with all my powers strive for the welfare of Slovenia.'”[1]
Systemic “dead technocracy,” hollowed of constitutional substance, based on the “Bozo effect,” with a mindset of “administering certificates” (so-called “fulfillment of formal conditions”) means, for my constitutionalist thought, in all such and substantially similar cases, a direct violation of the constitution—the spirit of the constitution, the constitutional substance. When the concept of “constitutional order” becomes subject to reduction to bare formalism and technocracy, when “respect for conscience” becomes merely a form for the arbitrariness of subjective decision-making, and the concept of “welfare” becomes a phrase without content, the constitutional substance is hollowed out and thereby nullified.
In “dead technocracy,” politics, daily politics, is always the one that from beginning to end also decides who is recognized and acknowledged (is granted such a label, such a quality) in a certain field as an “expert”. The entire system is an oasis of the “Bozo effect,” a testing ground for dead technocracy and the administration of certificates, for substantive hollowness. I insist on the thesis that in all of this, it is certainly also a “significant question of constitutionality”.
[1] In this regard, the current President of the Republic of Slovenia, dr. Nataša Pirc Musar, has proven beyond doubt every day of her term that one of her public statements made before her election is certainly true: “The role of president suits me perfectly.”