There are Only a Few Motivators for Most People
1. Power
2. Money
3. Love
4. Honor/Respect
5. Divine Rewards
The first two are selfish, and therefore valueless to someone who dies. But instances of people being motivated by the latter three to take extreme risks or even accept death outright are actually quite common. 494
Imagine a husband defending his family against a home invader, Spartan warriors embracing an honorable death at the battle of Thermopylae, or a religious martyr accepting death or torture for their faith.
Take a Lesson from Swords vs. Guns
Another aspect that could be useful is what I call the "Lightsaber principle." Swords were displaced as tools of combat by guns because the ability to kill someone from far away is obviously superior to having to get right next to them to do it. But sword fighting is way cooler, so <PERSON> needed to make ranged weapons less effective somehow, in order to justify the Jedi using lightsabers. He did this by enabling Jedi to deflect blaster attacks back at their opponents, rendering blasters useless against them, or perhaps even more dangerous than not firing at the Jedi at all.
You could employ a similar principle to make assassination more common, by providing methods of assassination which resist attempts to prevent or punish assassins. Imagine a telepath with the ability to kill someone remotely, which might be near-impossible to prove. Or an orbital weapon which could be used to take out leaders, before warping lightyears away. If punishment for assassins is rare, then there are few reasons not to assassinate a political rival, and people would be forced to accept it as a risk of being in politics, since there are no alternatives, and societies must be led by someone.
Combine these two principles, and you might have a society where assassinations are so easy, that politicians expect to die at some point in their career, and accept it as a sacrifice they make for the greater good, out of love for their families, or because the highest place in their afterlife is reserved for those who die in service of the society as leaders. 523