While the President regularly exhorted his local representatives to act as channels of communication faithfully relaying the ideas and aspirations of his subjects to him, this pervasive apparatus of state control was hardly conducive to an effective dialogue between rulers and ruled. These transactions were thus, inevitably, somewhat one-sided. Policy did change from time to time (and indeed in 1977 dramatically), partly in response to public opinion, but its course was sufficiently erratic to make it difficult for members of the public to be certain at a particular time of the precise boundaries of acceptable opinion. Reticence was clearly the safest policy, and people naturally told those in authority what they thought they wanted to hear.

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 522