Longer elected terms would lead to better government
If an elected representative is going to fight for their supporters, they need time to learn how to conduct that fight, and to gather the resources to win that fight. Otherwise they end up pandering.
Longer terms for politicians leads to better government. If legislators were elected for terms of 9 or 11 years then the democracies would enjoy much better leadership than what they currently get.
Some argue, “If the voters can’t punish the politician at an upcoming election, why would that politician behave well while in office?” Here they unthinkingly invoke the so-called “retrospective” model of voting, in which the electorate is supposed to be “a rational god of vengeance and of reward.” In this model, the voters keep track of what a politician does, and then rewards them with re-election if the politician did well, or punishes them if the politician did not do well. And yet, the evidence is overwhelming that, in real life, the majority of voters do not keep track of what politicians are doing. Achen & Bartels devote much of their book to showing how deeply flawed the so-called “retrospective” model of voting really is.
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 112-113
“The Founding Fathers,” Keys wrote in the final edition of his influential textbook on party politics, “by the provision for midterm elections, built into the constitutional system a procedure whose strange consequences lack explanation in any theory that personifies the electorate as a rational god of vengeance and of reward.”
In the first edition of the same textbook, Key (1942, 628) offered an even clearer dismissal of the rational interpretation of retrospective voting, noting that voters seem to have rewarded and punished incumbents at the polls for good or bad times…
Yet if the party control of the national Government had little or nothing to do with their fate, how is this behavior to be explained? Is it to be considered as a rational seeking to better one’s status by the ballot or is it merely blindly striking a blow at a scapegoat? To throw out the “ins” probably had about the same effect on economic conditions as evangelical castigation of Satan has on the moral situation. Perhaps the swing against the “ins” can best be described as a displacement of economic resentment on political objects. By this catharsis discontent was dissipated and the peace kept.
But if the retrospective model doesn’t work, then what does? Worldwide, the democracies are clearly more responsive to the public than the autocracies, and if the elections are not the main reason, then what is?
Politicians can be made to do what the public wants only by a system of checks and balances. It’s only a small exaggeration to say that a nation’s politics will be an expression of the nation’s institutions, including all educational and religious and civil and professional and also governmental institutions. While voting is part of that system of checks and balances, research suggests that it is currently one of the weakest (but with some changes it could be one of the strongest). Newspapers and media are more important than voting. Labor unions are essential. Other civic groups and NGOs are important. And conflict among elite groups opens up important avenues through which less powerful groups can demand accountability from the system, as the less powerful groups can join a coalition supporting one of the more powerful elite groups, and then if that elite group wins, the less powerful group also wins.
What’s crucial is this: if a weak group manages to elect a representative who is willing to do battle on behalf of that weak group, then short terms in office only weaken that representative, and therefore help keep the weak group permanently weak. Longer terms at least allow the elected representatives to go out and fight. If workers want to elect someone who will fight against the political influence of the corporations, they should keep in mind that the average CEO holds the role for 7 years and the most powerful CEOs hold their roles for 12 years. And that is how long a representative needs to be elected for, if they are to fight as an equal against the CEOs. (We previously suggested that activists, instead of whining about sellouts, should help idealistic reformers gain power and then accumulate political capital inside the system.)
Just as important, when leaders are elected to short terms, they face pressure to pander to short-term interests. Leaders elected to longer-terms would be able to take on long-term issues, such as a climate change, or investments in education, issues that tend to be sacrificed to short-term concerns.
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.
The fate of humanity hangs in the balance. If we elect leaders for 2 years, they will never have a chance to focus on any long-term issues, such as climate change. If we want the leadership to focus on long-term issues, then we need to elect the leadership to longer terms.
(Note: below I mention some European parliamentary systems. I realize it is confusing for me to talk about “longer terms” where the crucial issue is the instability of coalitions in parliamentary systems. Just remember, the goal is to have a government that is stable enough that it doesn’t have to pander to transient moments of public panic or rage.)
Are longer terms less democratic?
Some argue that more voting is more democratic. But why have a government at all? We want certain essential things from government: military security, a protection of our rights, a peaceful way to resolve disputes, the maintenance of the infrastructure on which our affluent world depends. We want some accountability, and therefore we want some voting, but there is clearly some law of diminishing returns that applies. At a certain point, too much voting gets in the way of delivering the things that we want from government. If the leadership needs to spend most of its time focused on re-election, because the terms in office are too short, then longer terms in office will give us better government.
Garett Jones says as much in his book:
10% Less Democracy
Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less
By Garett Jones, 2020
Page 20
These “bliss points” or sweet spots turn up again and again in a world of trade-offs. In evolution, there’s a trade-off between the benefits of bigger size–you’ll be stronger and so better able to catch prey–and the costs of bigger size–you’ll need more calories each day, plus a bigger organism has more cells that can break down, plus you’re an easier target for other predators to see. (It turns out that a strong rule in evolutionary biology is that larger mammal species have higher extinction rates. Tigers, elephants, and humans are relatively new, for instance, while the longest-lived mammal species include flying squirrels and a species of mole.) Each species finds its own unique sweet spot–a balance between the benefits and costs of a bigger size. In economics, any time we see a relationship that can be summed up as an inverted U, we’re pretty likely to call it a Laffer curve-type relationship, in homage to Art Laffer.
Fortunately, economists are well-equipped to compare costs against benefits, but it means discarding the linear–or at least ordinal–thinking that is often the default setting in the social sciences. More democracy, more medical spending, more income per person, more human rights, more, more, more. If the current amount is good, why not have more? It’s the buffet syndrome, an expression used in Singapore when people appear to overuse free government health care, so buffet syndrome means taking more with little regard to the cost.
But as we’ll see in the next nine chapters, voter involvement in government has not only benefits but costs–costs that are too often ignored. My contention is that the world’s rich democracies are overall on the wrong side of the democracy Laffer curve. Practical, non-utopian reforms exist that would:
Make a country slightly less democratic
Likely create substantial long-run economic benefits
Have little or no cost in resources
Be more likely to increase than to diminish widely embraced human rights.
He emphasizes how much our currently short terms distort everything that our elected leadership does:
Page 27-29
Career politicians are experts at getting reelected. In fact, the best short book on the U.S. Congress is built around that very idea. In Congress: The Electoral Connection, Yale political scientist David Mayhew argued that the best way to understand Congress is to think of it as a reelection factory. The entire system–committees, chairmanships, hearings, votes–gives members plenty of opportunities to show their constituents back home that they are doing big things–plenty of opportunities to build a reputation as effective, dedicated, responsive representatives. You may think that Mayhew is just painting a cynical picture of politics today, but he was writing back in the 1970s. His story is a perennial one.
Under one view of democracy–the delegate view–this is actually a great outcome. Elected politicians in this view are delegated sovereign power by the voters to make the same decisions that the voters themselves would make if they had the time and energy to keep abreast of the key issues. It’s a political version of the claim that the customer is always right. And one part of doing a great job representing your constituents is, well, letting your constituents know that you’re doing a great job. Perhaps a little showmanship is just part of the price of government by the people. Perhaps the cost to society of all this showmanship is quite low.
But Mayhew’s nearly anthropological analysis of Congress suggests otherwise. He was motivated in part by the work of my late George Mason University colleagues Jim Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, who pioneered the field now known as public choice. The public choice outlook treats politicians and voters largely the same way that economists treat firms and consumers: politicians want to maximize their chance of reelection just as firms want to maximize profits. Voters want political representatives who will give them the right bundle of goods and services at the lowest price, just as consumers want their preferred bundles of goods and services at the lowest price. Yes, there might be some altruistic politicians with noble motives, just as there might be profit-seeking corporations or nonprofits with noble motives–but in a competitive market, political or economic, it’s safest to bet that altruism is rarely the biggest motivator. An altruistic politician who decides not to run for reelection because she sees a better person in the running is about as rare as a carmaker telling customers, “Actually, the other guy’s car is better and cheaper.”
Driven to test the ideas of public choice theory, Mayhew showed how our political system itself creates dysfunction. When a politician has a choice between doing something where she can get public credit–like arranging funding or a Veterans Administration hospital expansion back in the home district–or doing something where she can’t claim public credit–like investigating intelligence failures, where it’s typically forbidden to publicly discuss committee work–a good politician doesn’t take long to figure out that now is a good time to work on those hospital expansions. The system encourages politicians to work on projects where it’s easier and more credible to publicly claim credit.
Of course, real human beings are much more complex that simple game theory predicts. Activists run for office and get in and fight for what they believe, to the extent that the system allows them to do so. We often see politicians fight for unpopular ideas, simply because they believe those ideas are morally good. We admire the figure who speaks bluntly and says what they mean. Examples of altruism spring up everywhere in human societies, and that includes our political system. But the current system does put the best people under a lot of pressure to behave badly, if they are to stay in the game long enough to do some good. And longer terms would therefore allow more of the bluntness and altruism that we admire.
Let us assume a scenario where elections to the legislature are staggered, so that there is constant turnover in the legislature. Elections might happen once a year, or once a month, as we discussed in a previous essay. The public would have more chances to express how it feels, though each politician would be free to consider the long-term, as their own term in office would be longer than before.
We previously listed some of the most admired leaders of both the left and the right and we noted that all of them came from safe seats. In the case of someone like Margaret Thatcher, it was a deliberate choice to give her a Tory safe seat. And safe seats help create great leaders, since it allows those leaders to focus on leadership, rather than having to think about elections. In other words, over the last 300 years, to the extent that the democracies have had good leadership, this has been achieved through a bit of engineering, where the system grants certain leaders lifetime posts, while pretending to do something different.
A final thought: the top judges in Britain are appointed for 18 years, which apparently is the length of time that Britain thinks offers the best balance of accountability and independence. So maybe our politicians should be elected for a single term of 18 years, with no chance of running for a second term? In such a case, they could spend 100% of their time focused on their legacy, without having to spend one minute thinking about re-election. If we outlaw a second term, but give them the equivalent of 4 terms, then they have the incentive and pressure to do some good in the limited time they have been granted.
UPDATE:
I saw this response online:
"Longer-terms in office don't lead to good governance, but instead, electing left-wing governments leads to good governance."
If we assume that's true, we immediately face some difficult questions. Over and over again we have seen left-wing governments get elected, and then they are immediately forced to push through right-wing policies, to pander to the public during some short-term crisis.
Consider France. In 1981, the Socialists, lead by Mitterand, took power. They had a long-term program to revive the French economy: massive investment in major firms, after nationalizing those firms. Take, for instance, the car maker Renault. The government nationalized it and was prepared to put massive amounts of money towards a program of automation so that Renault could better compete with the Japanese, American, and German car makers. Of course, at that time modernization would be mean switching to computers for the design work, and retraining the engineers to learn how to use CAD systems, and then creating new car designs, then redesigning the assembly-line with new machines to implement the new computerized system. Under ideal conditions, each of these phases would take 6 months, so it would be roughly 3 years before the first car, designed and built under the new system, would roll off the assembly line. Then it would take a massive world-wide marketing effort to change consumer's perception of Renault's cars. And how long till all of this lead to increased sales, increased profits, and increased exports? At least 6 to 7 years. If French politicians were elected for 9 or 11 years, then many might be able to carry out the whole program before having to face re-election. But in the real world, with an unstable coalition in parliament, and facing the inflation caused by the second OPEC crisis, the Socialists felt they had to abandon their program and pander to the short-term crisis of inflation, so they reverted to the kind of policies that the Conservatives might have offered.
France is hardly unique. Over and over again the public has elected a left-wing government but gotten right-wing governance.
In 1985 in New Zealand we saw the Labour Party win a large majority, then get into power and execute a hard-right turn, pushing through a wave of laws that pushed New Zealand down a neoliberal path.
After the crisis of 2008, in Britain, the Labour Party under Gordan Brown faced massive criticism from the press who repeated the Tory line that a crisis that was caused by debt could not be solved by more debt. "Media Macro" (a phrase invented by the economist Simon Wren-Lewis) turned Keynes on his head. All problems were blamed on debt, and the debt was blamed on Labour. With longer terms, Labour could have ridden out the crisis, followed an expansionary policy, and answered for their policies once expansionary policies had solved the crisis. But instead they felt they needed to pander to the immediate anger they were facing, so they began austerity. This allowed Conservatives to argue "We can do austerity better" and of course that is true — the Conservatives will always be better at austerity. Labour's pandering helped the Conservatives to win in 2010 and now Britain has suffered under 12 years of austerity, leading to the biggest erosion in living standards in modern history.
Finally, I’ll add a different kind of example, an example we mentioned in an earlier essay: it is worth noting that during the debate over the Brexit treaty, from 2016-2020, the Tories in the House Of Lords were far more reasonable and rational than the Tories in the House Of Commons. This example is especially interesting since we are comparing people who belonged to the same political party. The only difference between them is that one group was free to think about the long-term consequences of the treaty, while the other group was under pressure to pander.
One of the fundamental differences between the right-wing and the left-wing is that the left-wing wants to make long-term investments for the health of society. And that goal is forever undermined by the short-terms in office that we currently have, terms that seemed natural in the 1700s, when the goal was to ensure that Parliament was on a short-leash, always ready to answer to the property owners who elected the government. The expansion of the franchise, in the 1800s and 1900s, would have been far more radical in its impact if it had been accompanied by a lengthening of terms.
So if anyone on the left wants to argue "Longer-terms in office don't lead to good governance, but instead, electing left-wing governments leads to good governance" then they really need to stop and think about how historically wrong that is. The short elected terms that we currently have, in all Western democracies, will tend to favor the right-wing, since the right-wing very much wants us to focus on each short-term crisis, while ignoring the long term issues: education, health care, climate change.
UPDATE:
> "Longer-terms in office don't lead to good governance, but instead, electing left-wing governments leads to good governance."
I'm not the originator of the above objection, but I can't help notice your response to it -- though full of details that are important to know -- feels to me a bit like circular reasoning. Shorter terms did create the problems you described for leftist governments, but only because of the fear of a rightist government winning power. So for that sort of leftist, a more "on the nose" alternative to longer terms could be a system that prevents rightists from winning power. For example, in the U.S. the broad political left could be locked into power with two seemingly-neutral changes:
- Make D.C. a state, and also several dozen other large dense cities. This would stack the Senate with Senators elected by the demographic least likely to be rightist.
- Use large single-winner districts and a good Condorcet method, such as Ranked Pairs. Such methods create a strong tendency to elect someone at the political center of the district. Contrast this with the US's current method which tends to elect someone at the center of the district's largest party. Additionally, the political center of the district typically moves gradually, because the median is robust to shifts in outliers. Contrast this with PR systems in which crises often lead large blocs of voters to shift to more extreme parties. A sudden change in political winds would be all but ruled out, even as the clone-proof property of Ranked Pairs would allow any corrupt individual official to be thrown out.
There are some situations where more is generally better (such as a more educated citizenry, more civic associations, and more efficiency, etc.) Most people understand that more spending won't solve a problem which is why there is austerity and widespread concern about national deficits but the cost of running a technological society, uneven distribution of funding, and an aging population requiring more healthcare are part of what makes it difficult to reduce.