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My thesis, for what it’s worth is that this is a function of democracy and especially democratic systems with short terms of office. The way to get and keep office in any democratic system is to become really good at winning elections and doing the work is at best a sideline and at worst a problem. Having short election cycles makes this worse, as the time between elections isn’t long enough that a person can “get away” with doing the work. If you had elections once a generation, you’d have very little of this problem, because you get 20 years between campaigns and this is plenty of time to do a lot of good deep work for the people of your district or state or country without having to worry about whether or not the people are happy about it. If you were appointed, as we used to have governors appoint the senate, you’d never have to court public opinion, and therefore your ability to keep office relies on whether or not you impress the guy who appointed you or maybe those who can fire you. You can thus ignore public opinions and do what you believe is best for the country.
sounds to me like we need different states to experiment with different term durations. Federal politics would change significantly if house terms are 3 years, senate 9 years, and president 6 years.
I’m not convinced anything less than 5 years is long enough. It’s extremely short when the buildup to the election takes about a year and then you need at least half as long again to raise the funds to run. That makes, at current, the term of the house members of 24 months with 18 months of “reelection related activities” and 6 months of everything else. 6/24 is 1/4 of the term with 3/4 for running for the next election. Make it 36 months, and you’ll only have half of the term for actually doing things. Make it 5 years and it’s 60 months, and thus 7/10 of the term is for doing things and 3/10 is devoted to winning office. At this point it’s long enough that you can’t simply be good at running, you have to get things done. And at 5 years, you have long enough lead times that the results of the changes you make are going to be known and thus affect your ability to win (imagine having the effects of taxes or tax cuts coming known before we voted on whether or not to re-elect the guy who voted for it). It’s also long enough that longer term projects with upfront costs (especially infrastructure projects) become plausible.
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