Narrowing the path to power

New-old eligibility rules for less bad politicians

Elections, especially US federal elections, are awful and getting worse. This is a rare statement about politics to which you could get a cross-partisan supermajority to agree. How might we harness that supermajority consensus to build more functional future governing institutions?

Most directly, we might rely less on elections and more on other forms of democracy. Sortition, citizen assemblies, referenda, citizens’ juries— all hold out the promise of replacing legislative elections, at least, with better mechanisms for accountable and representative decision-making. Yet all seem very far away logistically and temporally, and even if used to their maximum, would be unlikely to wholly replace elected representatives. It’s worth looking for more incremental improvements that we can retrofit onto existing electoral systems. We can start by identifying particular pathologies of modern electoral candidates and making rules to exclude them. In naming two such rules below, I aim to avoid partisan bias and seek disqualification of large swathes of likely-bad candidates from both major parties.

No federal election should be anyone’s first rodeo

Upstart outsider populists in high office are generally bad news for institutional quality. This was true even before the 45th President of the US came on the scene and will be true after he is gone. The popular temptation to “throw the bums out” and bring in a non-politician who will “shake things up” is too easily harnessed by unqualified, impulsive, charismatic egomaniacs of all political stripes. And even when a really well-meaning, smart outsider does get in, they typically don’t have the expertise to deliver on their promise.

The Romans excluded outsider candidates by means of the cursus honorum. In the Roman Republic aspiring politicians were generally supposed to climb a ladder of offices in a specific order and serve for specific, short times: before being elected consul, the most “presidential” position, they had to serve as praetor first; before praetor, as aedile, and so on. From what I can tell their system of rules was fiddly, complex, and not always actually followed. We can do better today quite simply: require federal candidates to have held a responsible state or local office first.

Even a lenient definition of eligible offices would disqualify a lot of celebrities, grifters, self-important business executives, clueless ideologues, etc without unduly limiting the pool of candidates to choose from. Consider for example a requirement that Presidents, Vice Presidents, and members of Congress had to have previously been elected, and served at least one full term, as either:

• a state governor or lieutenant governor

• a member of a state legislature

• another major statewide elected office, e.g. attorney general, secretary of state

• mayor of a city, or executive of a county, of at least 10,000 people

• city council/county board member of a city/county of at least 10,000 people

This is a pretty long list of offices by which someone could acquire eligibility for a federal election. But anyone who has served in any of these offices at least has some experience with governing institutions, and a record of official decisions and actions by which they can be judged. Insisting that federal officeholders have that experience and that record would be a nonpartisan, nonideological improvement measure; it would gore many oxen, so to speak, in both parties, but also bolster party establishments, and so should have a path to bipartisan support.

Young(ish) blood needed

An even simpler improvement would be a mandatory retirement age. The gerontocracy now dominating the federal legislature is both depressing and stultifying; and in many cases it raises real questions about the stamina and even the mental capacity of the officeholders. We shouldn’t have to tolerate such questions when the job entails holding so much power.

Eighty seems a reasonable limit to start with for both Congresspeople and Presidents. As medical science increases healthspan, we can adjust it upward if need be. Or not; we may wish to keep the age limit stable to make sure that officeholders are drawn from those with a significant personal stake in at least the medium-term future.

What else?

There are probably other neutral rules which could aim at narrowing eligibility for high political office in order to prevent common failure modes. And there may be failure modes of the above proposals, too: it’s worth thinking about how each might be gamed and what pernicious, unanticipated side effects it might have. Comments welcome on both!