Democracy for Realists, Part 13 of 19
Leaders with longer terms have more political leeway to do what is right, and so they often demonstrate better leadership. In particular, they avoid pandering.
From the book:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 110-111
Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts’s analysis identifies the circumstances under which an incumbent may be tempted to “pander” - implementing the policy preferred by the voters even though her private information suggests that it will not serve their interests. In their basic model, pandering occurs when the probability is not too high that the inferiority of the voters’ preferred policy will be revealed before the next election (and if the expected quality of a prospective challenger is strong enough that the incumbent has to worry about her public standing at election time).
Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist Number 71 that politicians’ temptation to pander depends in part on the length of their terms in office, with longer terms encouraging politicians “to be the guardians of those [genuine] interests to withstand the temporary delusion.” Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts’s analysis has the same implication: the more distant in time is the next election, the more likely bad policies are to be revealed as such by the time the voters go to the polls. An intuitive recognition of this fact may help to account for the fact that American governors’ terms have been steadily lengthened since the late 18th century, when one-year terms were most common.
For lower-level offices, however, a good deal of variation in term lengths remains, and it seems to have just the sort of consequences suggested by Hamilton and by Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts’s analysis. For example, elected officials facing the issue of fluoridating drinking water in the 1950s and 1960s were significantly less likely to pander to their constituents’ ungrounded fears when longer terms gave them some protection from the “sudden breezes of passion” that Hamilton associated with public opinion. Figure 4.3 shows the dramatic difference that longer terms made to mayoral support for fluoridation. Many political leaders, not caring deeply about the topic, ducked; but those with longer terms had more political leeway to do what was right, and a significant fraction of them used it.
Longer terms lead to better government. And the democracies can distinguish themselves (from non-democratic government) with unusually good leadership by lengthening all terms. For some reason people accept this when it comes to judges, but people hesitate to apply this rule to legislators. In the USA Federal judges are appointed for life, and in Britain the top judges are appointed for 18 years – long terms in both countries. We all understand the importance of the independence of the judiciary, yet people are nervous about granting the same independence to the legislature.
Instead, the long terms need to be constructed by accident, by creating or finding safe seats that a legislator can get and then not have to worry about.
In our previous essay, I pointed out that most successful leaders, whether they are on the Left or the Right, come from safe seats, because they can only be good leaders if they come from safe seats. As I said then, it doesn’t matter if we are talking about Margaret Thatcher on the right or Edward Kennedy on the left, both needed to come from a district where they never had to worry about re-election. Their re-election was automatic.
Everyone who pays attention to politics eventually becomes aware that a society needs leadership, and the leadership needs to be personally safe in their own position so they can focus on the long-term needs of society. And so, an effort is made to game the system to create safe seats so that society can have good government. But it is noteworthy that this is done in defiance of the theory of the system, rather than consonant with it.
We could achieve a theoretically cleaner model if we said, “Anyone elected should be elected to a single term of 25 years.” That way they are given long enough to have a solid career, without ever having to face re-election. They would never have to pander. They can simply do good, focused on what their long-term legacy will be.
Someone might here raise the idea “Why would any leader behave well if they don’t have to face re-election?” But why isn’t this same question raised about judges? All of the Western democracies appoint national judges for very long terms, but somehow no one asks, “Why would the judges behave well if there is no way to punish them?” But with judges, we assume they will behave ethically, and we remove them when they are caught behaving unethically, and somehow this system works. It would also work for legislators, yet many people hate the idea.
Many people suggest “Politicians will only behave well if they know the voters might punish them at the next election.” This is the so-called retrospective model of voting. Achen & Bartels spend much of their book attacking this model, and I’ll be posting a long excerpt on the subject in the next essay. For now I’ll simply say, there is overwhelming evidence that voters do not keep track of what their elected representatives are doing, and therefore elections are not a referendum on the actions of the politician. The voters know nothing about what that politician has done in office.
Someone is also likely to respond “Republicans have recently engineered safe seats in the USA, but their goal is not good government.” This isn’t true at all. The Republicans have engineered House districts that will always be Republican, but these are not safe seats for any particular leader — the adoption of direct primaries means no Republican politician is actually safe. And what we’ve seen, over and over again, is moderate Republicans getting ambushed by far-right extremists. For Republicans, all of the safe seats have vanished.
Two things have made the situation especially bad: in the 1960s and 1970s direct primaries spread to every state, and television became central to politics. The first fact helps explain the second, as television would have had a limited impact if parties were still picking candidates at a closed convention. But as soon as a state introduces direct primaries, it is basically saying “From now on, candidates will be chosen on the basis of television.” So if a moderate Republican tries to do something reasonable, like impose some moderate limits on coal pollution, some billionaire with a connection to the coal industry can bankroll a far-right extremist to attack that Republican. And the presence of billionaires on the right is also why the spread of direct primaries and television seems to have destabilized the Republicans more than the Democrats.
If you are one of the people who think direct primaries are a great idea, ask yourself if there has been an obvious improvement in the quality of these Presidents:
Before universal adoption of direct primaries:
FDR
Harry Truman
Dwight Eisenhower
JFK
Lyndon Johnson’s
After the universal adoption of direct primaries:
Jimmy Carter
Ronald Regan
H W Bush
Bill Clinton
George Bush
Barrack Obama
Donald Trump
Joe Biden
Is this second group obviously better than the first group? If not, then perhaps direct primaries are a failed experiment?
(I left out Nixon because it isn’t obvious which group he belongs in. Direct primaries spread quickly during the 1960s and 1970s.)
Allowing the parties to chose their own candidates, without any public input, would help strengthen the parties and thus allow them to limit the influence of demagogues. It is well known that the Republican establishment would never have allowed Donald Trump to become the official nominee of the party. It is only because of direct primaries that Trump was able to gain power.
Above all, longer terms would eliminate the pandering and populism that, over and over again, leads to bad government and causes democracy itself to subsist with a bad reputation, as Churchill put it, “The worst of all systems, except for all the others.”
In truth, democracy can be the best of all possible systems, but only when it is well designed.