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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 a
by lkrubner 5y ago
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.
- mindslight 5y agoLong 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.