Democracy for Realists, Part 11 of 19

Term limits shift power away from elected representatives and towards long-term civil servants, as well as towards unelected figures, such as lobbyists.

From the book:

Democracy for Realists, 2016

Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels

Page 77

Supporters of term limit initiatives have displayed little regard for the cautions of political scientists regarding the likely unintended consequences of these measures. For example, in the run-up to the vote on California’s term limit initiative, political scientist Nelson Polsby (1990) argued that “term limitations just shift power from elected officials to the relatively inaccessible officials, bureaucrats and influence peddlers who surround them.” Polsby’s assessment is broadly consistent with subsequent evidence from surveys of state legislators in states with and without term limits, which found that legislative leaders lost significant influence in the term-limited states, while governors, legislative staffs, and bureaucrats gained influence (Carey, Niemi, and Powell 1998).

If the goal is simply to give free reign to technocrats and bureaucrats, then term-limits are a good answer. But if the goal is to bring technocrats under democratic oversight, then we need to go in the other direction and elect politicians for longer terms.

Whether for the military or for business or for politics, leadership is the most difficult skill that any human can hope to learn, it requires many years of hard study. Granting the elected leaders very long terms of 11 or 15 years gives them time to serve their apprenticeship and then, when they have learned how to be leaders, to give something back to society.

It is noteworthy that every good leader in a democracy, on both the left and the right, came from a safe seat.

Ask yourself, who are some noteworthy right-wing leaders?

Margaret Thatcher

Winston Churchill

Strom Thurmond

Jesse Helms

And on the left?

Edward Kennedy

Bernie Sanders

Dianne Feinstein

Patrick Leahy

Margaret Thatcher represented Finchley for 33 years. Patrick Leahy is currently in his 47th year of representing Vermont.

It doesn’t matter if a leader is on the left or the right, if they are going to get things done, they need to come from a safe seat, so they never have to worry about re-election. That frees them up to focus on what’s important, rather than wasting time on fundraising and saying nonsense in public. Having to face re-election in a hotly contested seat means a leader needs to smile and say contradictory things in an absurd effort to make everyone happy. By contrast, leaders who come from a safe seat can say exactly what they mean, and they don’t have to waste effort on re-elections.

But we can grant a safe seat to every person who is ever elected, simply by electing them to very long but single term. Again, electing them to a single term of 11 or 15 years means that everyone elected gains all the benefits of coming from a safe seat: they can always say what they mean, they never have to smile or try to make people happy, and they can focus on getting things done, rather than focusing on fund-raising and campaigning.

Consider also, if you think a single term of 15 years is a long time, it also means the majority of the legislature is automatically replaced every 8 years, which is faster than the turnover rate currently seen in the USA, Britain, France, or Germany. In the USA Senate the average length of service is 11 years but that is dragged down by the people who retire voluntarily. Of those who seek re-election, more than 90% win re-election in the House.

Keep in mind, a number of safe seats have disappeared, especially on the right, not because the Democrats can challenge those seats, but because the politician can face a primary challenge from further right. The Republican Party establishment was moderate, for more than a century, and appointed moderate candidates. The spread of direct primaries, in the mid-to-late 20th Century, helped invent the modern era of extremism. Nowadays an extremist billionaire can attack any moderate Republican, by funding some extreme right candidate to run in the primary. And so Republicans from conservative areas, who used to have safe seats, can now be attacked from the right, so the seats are no longer safe. The loss of these safe seats did not bring the USA a new era of democracy, instead it brought an authoritarian movement that wants to end democracy completely.

An absolute limit of 15 years also trims some of the careers which people who favor term limits might be most wary of:

With monthly elections it would be possible to think of voters as steering the country the way a ship’s captain steers a boat. If you make a mistake, you don’t go backwards and try to undo the mistake, but rather, you keep going forward, and you adjust your steering as you go forward. Likewise, you don’t try to undo the election of someone bad, you just focus your energy on next month’s election and you try to elect someone really good.

If the political establishment blocks reform, it is understandable that the idealists will then cast about for the answer to the question, “How do we outflank the political establishment?”

And it is easy to see why direct referendums might seem like an answer to that question. And yet direct referendums are simply won by whoever can do the most advertising on television and social media. Another way forward, that the idealists need to consider, is that they should elect their fellow idealists, and change the internal rules of the legislature to make it easier for newly elected idealists to better set the agenda and thus outflank the political establishment.