I guess the key difference is totalitarianism. Totalitarian governments are so all-consuming, and the deceptions that sort of society uses are just profoundly different, because of the way such a deception must be approached.

With everything stemming from one big organization, the question is never if the government did it, but which government agents are the ranking officials responsible, and what are they up to?

When you have a non-totalitarian government, where officials are lesser celebrities if at all, and maybe such a government that acts as a referee for the rest of its citizens, the way it behaves gets weirder, and less predictable.