The Monkey Cage

John:

I’m ambivalent about term limits. On the one hand, it seems unfair/undemocratic to prohibit a single individual from running for office. On the other hand, in light of the enormous electoral advantages that incumbents enjoy when they seek re-election, some means of achieving a greater circulation of the elites seems appropriate.

Just some offhand comments that may (or may not) spark responses.

I’ve always seen term limits as undemocratic. If the majority of voters would like to see someone stay in office, why not let them vote?

I used to think that way, when I understood democracy as = elections. But a view of elections as simply one of the ways in which democratic ends might be supported (or not) allows for a more favorable view of term limits, as Lee’s response suggests.

After all, terms limits actually do better than 90%+ reelection rates at approaching Aristotle’s conception of democracy (his views on it aside) as “ruling and being ruled in turn.”

Term limits are a hatchet.

I’m not sure what the “fix” is for high incumbent reelection rates, but term limits throw out the baby with the bath water, while simultaneously making it more likely that the new bath water will be worse.

I recently had a delightful conversation with a state representative who was complaining about term limits in his state. He said that term limits, when initially enacted, allowed a second generation of talented politicians, who had been stymied for years by the entrenched first generation, access to power. But then the third generation turned out to be a bunch of lightweights. Now anyone who hangs out with party officials long enough will eventually find him/herself in the state legislature.

I support term limits to the degree that there is no political competition in the jurisdiction. In NY, we have had virtually no general election competition nor primary competition in the period before term limits. The local campaign finance system, developed in part to inject some competition into the process, has done nothing more than line the pockets of consultants and printers . Term limits prevented deep, systemic complacency among elected officals, some of whom were tracking in at 20, 30 years! Regarding the city council capacity issue, the party caucus run out of the speaker’s office, with the assistance of long-serving professional staff, makes the important decisions.

The goal of neighborhood representation, the important service that backbench members provide, has a relatively low-sloped learning curve. And the new elected officials are typically not novices—they all have deep ties to the neighborhoods (deeper even then the old, complacent members) and council capacity has not suffered at all since the imposition of term limits.

I think that lots of the studies in political science take too many pols and staff at their word—of course no one in politics likes term limits, because it creates a lot of anxiety and uncertainty regarding one’s career. And political science—a discipline anxious about its own status in the world and in the academy as a “profession”—instinctively opposes any attempts to downgrade professionalism as an ideology. Recall political science’s love affair with the old Daley machine, Polsby’s love of the “institutionalized” Congress… experts studying experts, that is what makes political scientists who study American institutions warm and happy when they go to bed and drift off to sleep.