That’s true, and my bad for implying otherwise.

But I also think much more critically, they’re back to denying coverage exactly the way they were before Thompson died.

tl;dr Find a better method.

Repeated use of the same drug will bring marginal gains.
Companies will evolve to create lower cost (lower impact) figureheads.

Cruelty works best when it is used all at once.
Operant conditioning, as stated by EldritchFeminity above, is better applied in a case where you have higher levels of control over the subject’s environment.

If you do want to continue doing so slowly, then you need to accompany this with other operations…
like using the shock period to gather opinions into a voice gives a clear-ish indication to what behaviour caused the event and what change in behaviour would prevent further repetition.
One might think that it is something very obvious and everyone knows the difference between what they are doing vs what they should be doing, but sometimes just saying it out loud makes a big difference.

This is one methodology where an authority would excel at. And this particular methodology would horribly fail with a non-authority.
But any authority needs to be trustworthy, which requires consistency. And considering how all pre-established authorities are collectively deciding to fall towards inconsistency, I see authorities failing and hence, the methods that work with authority.