Term limits shift power away from the representatives that the public has democratically chosen and instead empowers those bureaucrats who serve in government for 40 or 50 years. Please see:

"Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government"

by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels.

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsi...

If you want democratically elected representatives to be able to gain power over the machinery of government, then you should advocate for longer terms, without limits. If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we would get better government.

> If you want democratically elected representatives to be able to gain power over the machinery of government, then you should advocate for longer terms, without limits

Sure, but long terms make the democratically elected representatives are less representative of the public will because of lack of immediate accountability.

What would be better is current terms, absence of term limits, and candidate-centered proportional—e.g., by single transferrable vote (STV)—elections in multimember districts (say, up to 5 member districts for the House, two-member for the Senate by putting those from the same state in the same class and electing them together), so that typically there is some choice at the general election within parties (e.g., a party with an incumbent but not all the seats available would usually be incentivized to run at least one more candidate to contest for a potential additional seat) and more viable parties, so that you have both accountability and representatives that are durable in office if they retain popular support.

> If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we would get better government.

If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we get government even more detached from the popular will, both legislatively, executively (because of the Senates veto of top executive appointments), and in judicial selection.

And the reduced accountability would supercharge corruption, too.

"we get government even more detached from the popular will"

Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels present an abundance of evidence that there is no popular will. The public does not understand the issues. The voters do not know what they want. Achen and Bartels also make the interesting argument that when there is more than one issue (more than one dimension) it becomes difficult to build a 51% coalition that also has 51% support on every issue, and where there are, say, 100 issues, it becomes almost mathematically impossible to build a 51% coalition that also holds the popular position on every issue. Put differently, to win elections, politicians must advocate for some deeply unpopular issues. This is the most important thing to understand if we are going to understand "Why elections do not bring about responsive government." (the subtitle of the book).

Of course, it would be possible to solve this particular problem (multi-issue voting lacking a 51% equilibrium) if voters had one vote for every issue. Not that there is any way to know how many issues a voter might regard as important, but giving voters more than one vote, and allowing the election of more than one candidate, does solve some of the mathematical problems that Achen and Bartels raise.

On the other issue, that the public is ignorant of most issues, remains a real concern.

> Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels present an abundance of evidence that there is no popular will.

If one takes that seriously, the solution is to abandon elections and the pretense of democracy entirely.

Arend Lijphart, on the other hand, has shown that there is a public will, people do know what they want, and that democratic systems with greater electoral proportionality deliver it to them better and make them happier with government.

"the solution is to abandon elections and the pretense of democracy entirely"

That does not follow at all. The benefits of democracy have been well-documented -- as well documented as the fact that the voters don't understand the issues and do not know what they want. The evidence on both points is overwhelming. Those facts are not in contradiction to each other, rather, it is clear that the benefits of democracy do not come from the voters. The benefits must come from somewhere else:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

If Senators served 15 year terms, without limits...

We'd be right back where we are now - people server 30+ years, so entrenched in serving their own good and not the public good.

I'd ask you to consider the possibility that it doesn't matter how long an individual serves, what does matter is whether that person's party can lose power. It's an argument explored by Achen and Bartels, and I wrote about it here:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

> what does matter is whether that person's party can lose power.

With 15 year terms, that can't happen on any reasonable timetable, either. If you maintained the three-class system, you’d have 1/3 of the Senate elected every five years. If you kept roughly equal sets every two years you'd have 2/15 (13-14 out of 100) every 2 years.

The risk of losing power could potentially happen every month, if you have elections every month. Electing 3 people a month for 15 years would give a legislature of 540 people, the size of the combined houses of the USA Congress and close in size to the British parliament. I'd suggest every voter gets 2 votes and then the top 3 vote-getters are then elected. Of course, when one side has a large lead, it means they are safe for a few months (if you've got 30 person lead, then you know you are safe for at least 10 months). And also, such a system suggests the whole polity voting for national figures, without representation of specific geographic regions. As with software, it is a set of tradeoffs about what kind of system one wants to has. The important thing to realize is that most of the current problems with democracy can be fixed, by adapting a different architecture, which would have different starting premises. The goal would be to have a government that functions well and which has mechanisms of accountability that limit corruption and abuse.

> The risk of losing power could potentially happen every month, if you have elections every month. Electing 3 people a month for 15 years would give a legislature of 540 people, the size of the combined houses of the USA Congress

The proposal was for Senators specifically. This is clearly different, but it's not clear what it is. So, is your proposal:

(1) to abolish the Senate, and do this in the House, or (2) to abolish the House, and do this to the Senate, maintains equal representation (540 not being divisible by 50 makes this problematic), (3) to abolish the House, and do this to the Senate without equal representation, or (4) to do this to the House, but retain the Senate as is, or (5) something else?

Note that #3 and arguably #1 are outside the power of even a Constitutional Amendment, since the power to amend the Constitution explicitly does not extend to removing equal representation of states in the Senate.

> Of course, when one side has a large lead, it means they are safe for a few months

A 4 seat (<1%) lead is safe for 6 mmonths. A 16 seat (3%) lead is safe for 15 months. A margin the proportional size of that after the 2018 House election in the US would take losing every seat up for election for 3 years, 9 months to lose. These are small margins; a large lead is absolutely secure for lot longer than “a fee months”.

> The important thing to realize is that most of the current problems with

I’m fully behind that. Long legislative terms just is a very bad idea that is hyperfocused on one (overstated) problem and which makes (almost independent of what else you try to do alongside) most other problems worse.

"A margin the proportional size of that after the 2018 House election in the US would take losing every seat up for election for 3 years, 9 months to lose"

You make it sound like that is a long time. In Britain, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it unlikely there will be many elections held at less than 5 years.

But having a safe majority that is locked in for longer than 5 years can bring benefits. The evidence is overwhelming that the current majority is, at all times, ignorant, irrational, biased, bigoted and impulsive. Therefore, we should want all real power to be in the hands of the long-term majority, not the current majority. Big changes should come from majorities that manage to survive for several years.

I believe you are a software developer? So you should understand the concept that a signal can be derived from a noisy source, given enough time.

> You make it sound like that is a long time.

It is compared to the claim that “a large margin is safe for a few months”.

> In Britain, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it unlikely there will be many elections held at less than 5 years.

Yes, but it assures that 100% of seats will be elected in 5 years, and that no majority is safe for longer than that and none takes more than a majority of the elections in that time to overturn.

> The evidence is overwhelming that the current majority is, at all times, ignorant, irrational, biased, bigoted and impulsive

No, the evidence is that effectively representative, responsive democracies produce the best results for their people. The US mostly fails on effective representation, and the proposed change would compound that by making it also fail on responsiveness.

> Big changes should come from majorities that manage to survive for several years.

Sure, maybe, that's why procedures that require long (e.g., multistage, with legally or practically mandatory delays) process for major changes arguably make sense.

But rendering any substantial majority effectively immune to change once established defeats the purpose of that. If the argument is correct at all, it is that big changes should come from legislative majorities that survive for an extended time because they represent a durable majority in the electorate.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I tend to think of which party is in 'power' as just a proxy for which party gets the biggest bribes :-P

But tbh, if I had the answers, I'd run for govt :-D

I'm convinced we need more people without answers going in in government.

It bugs me that every representative we elect is expected to have their own plan other than to "represent". Fast talk and snappy speeches are cheap. Willingness to acquire deep understanding, be challenged, and even sometimes put your own convictions aside for your constituents, and the systems that exist to serve them? That's hard.

You can easily solve for that too:

- No federal employee making in excess of 2x (3x?) poverty level may remain on the job for more than 8 years. Possible exemptions: senators + enlisted military personnel. (Need more turnover at the top of officer corps anyway)

- No appointee federal bureaucrat may remain on the job for more than 8 years

- Any appointed bureaucrat or elected official, will have a fixed 79% and 99% tax bracket on any income in excess of the high watermark of the average income in the 5 years preceding their appointment or election.

There. Fixed it. Want to serve?

Do it for duty Not for money.

Perhaps having career bureaucrats isn't exactly the best thing, either. Many people complain about the lack of term limits for congress but most don't seem to have a problem with the byzantine bureaucracy that practically necessitates having these career bureaucrats, who are often the ones implementing _real_ policy. (I.e. the administrative state).

The advice I give to startup CEOs, regarding their business, is exactly the same advice that I would give to every citizen regarding their government:

"Take, for instance, money. A small team of highly ethical individuals can generally trust one another to safeguard money in an appropriate way. Many small churches and family businesses are run this way, with loose controls over who can deposit or spend. However, as a company grows, the chance you'll hire an unethical individual also grows. At a certain scale it is almost certain that a worker will steal some money, if they have the chance to do so. So a company must impose rules about handling money, and there needs to be a process for paying bills, with someone authorized to write checks and use the company credit cards. This is the beginning of your financial bureaucracy, and the tight limit on who holds the authority to spend is the beginning of hierarchy in this area."

"Is this a bad thing? Again, you'll confuse yourself if you think about this in terms of good or bad. Just focus on your goals. What strengths do you want to build into your organization?"

"Nowadays, there is a widespread idea that bureaucracy makes an organization rigid. But consider the ways that a well-designed bureaucracy for money control can make your organization more flexible. If you decide to keep your money control bureaucracy small then you'll also need to keep your purchasing process simple, perhaps by centralizing all purchasing decisions in the hands of the CEO or CFO. That one individual then becomes a choke point that limits progress – nothing can get done until they find time to pay some bills and buy some necessary materials or services. And there is an obvious limit on how much the company can grow when the authority to pay a bill is so limited. But even when the money handling bureaucracy grows to three or four people, that’s still not enough to oversee complex spending patterns, so your company will still be forced to follow simple and inflexible rules. By contrast, what if you wanted to decentralize the power to make purchases? What if you wanted to empower each team with the ability to make whatever purchases they felt they needed, up to some reasonable limit? That would make your organization much more flexible, but it also makes it more difficult to track the money, and therefore it requires a larger bureaucracy for tracking each dollar. My point is, the larger bureaucracy can actually help enable some kinds of decentralized decision making, and thus improve the agility of the organization. A growing bureaucracy does not automatically equal growing inflexibility, rather, the whole point is to try to maintain flexibility at scale."

An excerpt from:

"Don't make a fetish of having flat organization"

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/dont-make-a-fetish-of-havin...

Maybe term limits for all government employees. 10 years and you are out. Of course then you would likely end up with tons of former government employees working as contractors to the government. Ban that next? This is a hard problem to solve with rules and laws instead of culture.

If we want good government, then we need civil servants who are willing to work their whole careers in government. If we want good military officers then we need people who will devote their whole life to the military. If we want good park maintenance we should hope for people who are willing to live their whole lives as park rangers. If we want accurate budget projections, we need accountants and economists who are willing to commit their whole lives to understanding the relationship between government policy, taxes, and the results on the budget.

Term limits won't get us there. We need to go in the other direction.

> If we want good government, then we need civil servants who are willing to work their whole careers in government.

Working for a long time on a given problem may make one competent, but it doesn't make one good.

That's an interesting idea and it makes a certain kind of sense, but I would hate to be 17 though when my senator gets elected and be stuck with someone I hate an didn't vote for until I'm 32.

That's just it though, once we start considering how to fix one issue, we realize that a particular design decision is part of a wider architecture, and it's impossible to change the one design decision without undermining the whole architecture. It's like software, in a sense, that if you try to quickly patch a system, with no regard for the assumptions of the system, you will end up with tech debt. That implies that actually fixing the problems with our democracy requires a hard re-think of certain fundamentals. If you're at all interested, I plan to spend the next year writing about this issue:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/what-i-hope-to-prove

> That's just it though, once we start considering how to fix one issue, we realize that a particular design decision is part of a wider architecture, and it's impossible to change the one design decision without undermining the whole architecture

'Sokay, the architecture is fundamentally flawed, in part because it was designed when less was known about the pragmatics of representative democracy because of less extensive experience and no systematic research and analysis, but also because in some parts it was designed with bad purpose (notably, entrenching chattel slavery.)

Undermining the whole architecture ought to be the goal.

Designing a new architecture should also be a goal, otherwise we will end up in that limbo where the old system has been destroyed but the new system has not yet been built. From what I've read in history books, such transitions are uncomfortable.

The claim is that civil servants are the bad guys and yet somehow people we make into civil servants would somehow "fight for us" - its the same line of bullshit that politicians have been hawking for decades in America.

I'm an outsider! They yell, as they have private meetings for billions.

Pelosi has been in office for 18 terms... so how hasn't she been able to "fix the system"?

No, the claim is that civil servants are not directly responsible to the constituency. Like it or not, Representatives are elected every two years by their constituents. Representatives get to do what they want as long as their constituency is ok with it (within the bounds of their own body's rules, which they get to vote on)

That implies what, though? That the people get the government they deserve due to their unwillingness to learn and vote people out of office?

Or they get the government they want, or they don't get the government that they don't want. The later seems more often to be the way people vote.

Gerrymandered districts and two party politics where the other guy is the worse guy conspires pretty well to make sure this never happens.

Gerrymandering is an issue, but it's actually the solution to greater problems. Gerrymandering itself is performed by elected officials who, again, are responsible to their constituency. The practice can be seem undemocratic, but the two party system is an eventuality, if one party starts gaining too much power and popularity then people will just start joining that party which will create a schism which will in turn create another party. We cannot guard against a two party system.

Because one individual rep has limited power? This is a positive thing and not a negative

Pelosi is the Speaker, not some backbencher with one vote. She has enormous power, perhaps only second to the President.

It depends on what you mean by power. She has only as much power as her caucus will afford her. The role of Speaker has it's limits, and she's not really popular enough in party politics to sway the zeitgeist.

Right now we get that with the huge advantage incumbents have over any challengers.

If legislators need long terms to provide good government, but they have unfair advantages at re-election, then the solution would be very long terms that are also single term. Perhaps a legislator is elected for 18 years (the amount of time that the top judges serve in Britain), but is only allowed to serve one term. So there are no re-elections. The legislator has one long term to do some good, and then they are gone.

Some people dislike the idea of legislators serving long terms. I've always wondered why, exactly, we are comfortable with judges serving long terms, but not legislators.

Long single terms would remove the lone check of the ballot box. Get in, and then shamelessly profit for an 18 year term. Maybe it would be better because a newcomer might produce a year or two of honest work at the start of their term, but more likely they'd be coming from a lower office where they learned to be thoroughly corrupt.

What's really needed is an end to backwards plurality voting and monopolistic primaries - have one big runoff vote. Make voting for better candidates not be at odds with accepting the safe option. Of course no politician is going to support this, as marketing themselves as the lesser of two evils has become the entirety of their promotion.

Furthermore, get rid of terms and have every single office on the ballot every single year, or better yet every quarter. This would make it much harder to spend overwhelmingly on campaigns (since the campaign would never end). It would also provide a stage for challengers to gain momentum organically rather than this long-iterated process where a challenger becomes viable in one cycle only to be forgotten the next time.

It also tends to empower lobbyists, not in the sense of elected officials needing money for campaigns, but the officials and their staffs lack knowledge and sophistication on many issues.

Is this based on real data, or is it just theoretical?

Electing Senators for life is essentially what we have now, and that seems to be working spectacularly.

The research on this has built up over the last 120 years and Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels survey most of that, starting with the critics of Progressive Era reforms, and moving up to modern studies of situations where the public has made poor choices because the voters do not understand the issues.

Well, it'd certainly reduce the amount of time spent by politicians on getting re-elected.

Which could be a good thing. See the book "10% Less Democracy":

https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/15...

40 to 50 years is still greater than 15 though isn't it?

True, though the ratio of 15 to 45 is better than the ratio of 2 to 45. I'm assuming there is some law of diminishing returns here, that hasn't set in at 2 or 4 years, but has set in by 15 years. In other words, a politician who has to run for office every 2 years is powerless in the face of civil servants, whereas a political who runs for office every 15 years definitely has the time needed to force a showdown with civil servants, whenever civil servants are acting in a rogue manner.

> True, though the ratio of 15 to 45 is better than the ratio of 2 to 45.

Senate terms are 6 years, not 2.

Are we still talking about Pelosi? She’s not a Senator

> Are we still talking about Pelosi? She’s not a Senator

We’re talking about the suggestion “if every Senator were elected for 15 years...

Which, yes, was an odd suggestion in this thread for the reason you point out, sure.

Thanks for clarifying, it was a bit hard for me to follow on mobile

What does one have to do with the other? Do you have valid reasons for thinking corruption of Senators or Representatives would be less with term limits? I think the level of corruption would not change with term limits and there are some negatives with term limits. I don't see how it would help.

Pelosi has been in congress since the 80s. I do not think congress-critters will support higher ethical standards that prohibit them from profiting off of insider information if they think that means putting themselves in a straight-jacket for the rest of their lives. The ability to profit off insider information is probably a reason some of our congress-critters stay in office rather than retiring and pursuing goals elsewhere.

Through the 80s and 90s, I recall politicians and talking heads using the phrase "...even the appearance of impropriety". I'm tempted to conclude there's something telling about the way this quaint phrase seems to have disappeared.

EDIT: not saying term limits are the answer, just that I can see the relationship suggested.

My contention is that we have very corrupt politicians leading the country. That corruption will not go away with the imposition of term limits. It's a bad response to the problem of corruption. I don't know what would solve the problem but strongly feel term limits is not the solution. I know you aren't saying that term limits are the answer; I'm clarifying my position.

I do agree that politicians aren't even trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Their response seems to be that in the absence of absolute proof of impropriety then any appearance of it is ok.

The solution is the require everyone that holds high office to put all their investments in a blind trust when they take the oath of office.

FWIW, I agree with you. For a brief time in the 90s, the topic was au courant, and my opinion was that is was a smoke-screen against campaign finance reform.

Can you elaborate why term limits wouldn’t at least help the problem?

A term limited politician will want to secure their future and will go into the job with the knowledge that their time is limited no matter how well they do the job. They’ll seek compensation. The corruption will morph to adapt to the new reality of term limitations but the amount of corruption will not decrease.

I see, so basically people are greedy. Yet under that same predicate, wouldn’t the same greedy senator be worse in-perpetuity?

Neither worse nor better. Just different form of corruption. Term limits is not a good way to fight corruption.

The Democrats held the House of Representatives for something like 40 years straight until 1994. You had famous scandals involving entrenched Democratic Congressmen. In 1994 Republicans made term limits a rallying point and they took over the House. Both parties have since jostled for control of the House. But when Republicans had the power they did not impose term limits. It’s just a rallying point and will do nothing to stop corruption. There may be good reasons for term limits but anti-corruption isn’t one of them.

>> Do you have valid reasons for thinking corruption of Senators or Representatives would be less with term limits?

I like to think people's terms limit would be reached before they get jaded and cynical.. At the very least, it would reduce the number of years (and hence the total amount of money) lobbyists, etc. would be focused on them. Someone that might think $100K in lobbyist money isn't worth the risk of repercussions, might think $1M (over time) is.

I believe otherwise. A term limited politician will look for ways to secure their future. I think with term limits we'd end up with even more legislation effectively written by lobbyists. Think Robert Rubin type corruption on an even wider scale than it is today.

I don't think we _could_ end up with more legislation written by lobbyists. It's pretty much 100% already.

I think at the worst, we'd be right where we are now...

Plus with term limits, at least we'd be rid of them, instead of having them perpetually come back...

However, the litmus test would probably be if we actually get term limits.. After all, if they're that corrupt, they won't vote against their own interests.

Lots of already cynical people go into politics.

True dat

With limits on how long they can hold the office, there will be a much shorter time span in which they can collect and act on inside information. There will also be a much shorter time span in which they can form relationships with these companies that could lead to the collection of inside information.

In my opinion it's not a solution but it is another way to limit the amount of this kind of trading.

Yes, it might limit this type of trading but the corruption will just be another type.

rather than worrying specifically about term limits, i think the general solution to political corruption is much more democracy, not less. make it very, very expensive for money to corrupt power, and make it hard to stay in power without maintaining fairness and integrity in the political system.

instead of 100 senators, let's have 100 per state [0]. instead of 1 representative per 750,000, let's go back to the original 1 per 30,000, giving us 11,000 representatives. let's have 99 supreme court justices, rather than 9. let's elect all the cabinet positions directly and separately. instead of multi-year terms, let's vote every single year for each representative office, and make election day a mandatory-paid holiday for everyone (to give folks time to research and consider their votes). let's convert many more administrative positions to elected offices. repeal citizen's united, which flooded political campaigns with unlimited amounts of corporate money (giving the wealthy even more disproportionate voice on top of their already disproportionate voice).

it's be messy at times, but we don't get good civics and good governance without the people being given more time and space to think about governance in depth.

[0]: alternatively, we could divide up states into smaller entities, which would be even better for decentralizing power (and limiting corruption), but that's much harder to do.

While I rather like this idea, there's something to the fact that we need a check/balance. What you don't want is to have a mob make bad policy, which I think is what would happen in this case.

This is precisely why individual states can stand up to the federal government -- people in California could make policies that devastate Maryland, for example. Not because they want to, but because they lack context --- even reasonable authority.

that scenario is unlikely in the proposed scenario, since the powers of the federal government is limited insofar as targeting like that is expressly prohibited. indirect targeting (crafting the specifics of a bill to exclude all but the target) is more prevalent amongst a smaller number of insiders working in dark corners of legislation. having many more people involved, and a more democratically-involved populace, provides sunshine on dubious shit like that.

Senators used to be representatives of the States, appointed by the States' legislatures. We should return to that.

I'm ambivalent on term limits for House members like Pelosi, though. They are representatives for the people of the States, and as such the people they represent have the right and ability to kick them out, or not. There is also the argument that would you rather have a dog that knows where the bones are buried, or a dog that digs up the whole yard?

That said, members of Congress should have severe restrictions on investing for themselves and their immediate family. They either need to police it themselves, or there needs to be some kind of law that covers it. Not that that is going to happen, as we have the ultimate in foxes guarding the henhouse in our government these days, but it would make for a powerful populist position if anybody had the courage to push it.

> Senators used to be representatives of the States, appointed by the States' legislatures. We should return to that.

That might be tolerable, right after we reduce the powers of the Senate to those of the British House of Lords, which it's original theory of representation is as outdated and inconsistent with representative democracy as, and transfer it's para-executive functions to the House.

Tbf it's a tangibly more meaningful problem with people who are actually Senators, aren't up for reelection every 2 years, and are in a chamber that's disproportionately weighted toward backwaters by design (and not just as a function of the redistricting process).

Pelosi is a Representative, so none of those things are true here.

How about a electoral system that isn't First Past the Post?

Give the voters the ability to pick more than two options.

California state offices have term limits, i voted for them, and they are terrible. No one can make a living as a legislator, so we have beginners and they are getting steam rolled by lobbyists. There is now a revolving path of moving from one office to the next to make a living. It is crazy.

I think many people don’t think “politician” should be a career option.

However, there are some states that don’t pay their legislators at all and that comes with its own problems.