What if the length of a term was proportional to the amount you won by in the election?
Seems odd that if you win by 0.001% that's treated the same as if you win by 50%. "You barely won, here's the same mandate as someone who won soundly"
Probably a bad idea, but there's an idea in there that isn't dumb.
I like this question, although I don't think it could work. Someone who campaigns really well, does not necessarily mean they will fulfill their office well. It also penalizes when there are two good candidates running against each other.
I could see it being more viable if the upper term limit is still along the lines of what we have today. Perhaps a presidential candidate winning an election by landslide could get a maximum term of 8 years, whereas someone just barely winning would have a shortened term of 1-2 years. I would definitely still be concerned about the negative ramifications of potentially more and more dirty campaigning to try and capture the highest portion of votes that others have mentioned.
I mean, that's to a minor extent how parliamentary systems work. There's a limit on how long you can go without an election, sure, but the government can call one basically whenever they want, which means if they have a stronger mandate they'll probably try to stretch it out whereas if they barely have a government yet the people support them they may try another election to increase their standing, and if you have a flimsier support you may end up being vote-of-no-confidence-ed sooner
No, it'd just be giving more incentives for politicians to lie, cheat and steal. If getting a full 100% of the votes means you get to reign for life like a monarch, then the amount of misinformation, buoyed by an industry made infamous by Cambridge Analytica, and aided by PR, Ad agencies, and Facebook, would explode. If that's not enough, politicians can just outright cheat and steal, prevent supporters of their opponent from voting, pervert the existing laws to one's ends, or downright steal the ballot boxes (and tamper with the votes or how they are counted).
It'd magnify the worst of current politics by giving politicians a reward for playing dirty.
Fixed-length terms prevents the incumbent from having any excuse to try to extend their term.
hah very good point.
Biggest problem with this is election cycles.
It's no easy thing to facilitate and organise every single person in your country to put in the effort to vote, manage the logistics of vote transportation and administration tasks like rezoning districts to match population density etc.
Even though we see it as a thing which takes a few months, the gears never stop turning, and if you want to wedge a crowbar between those gears, you might want to start preparing for a civil war.
This is the exact opposite concept of a representative democracy. What we should be asking is that our representatives should be voting based upon their margin of victory. For example, if you win by one vote you need to REPRESENT your constituents 50/50.
One of the major problems with politics is that those elected think they should vote based solely on their own opinion, which is not representative.
Short sightedness in politics is already painful for all of us.
Nobody's tackling climate change, nobody's building anything fairer for younger generations, especially in places without enough housing (and what there is owned by older generations).
I won't list all the problems this would make worse, but for example, do you really want a government with only 6 months to do 2-3 extreme populist things, hoping to dredge up enough support to get a larger mandate next time?
I too doubt it could work but man it would be great if it was margin of victory rounded up to the nearest 10 percent with one year for each 10 percent maximum 5 years. Oh and no re-elections one term based on your first result then out. To get the max you would ned over 70% of the vote. Also all unopposed elections are one year terms.
If we didn't live in a universe of an obviously (over)reactionary electorate this might be the ideal.
The problem is consensus building takes time, as long as political wins are narrow you're reinforcing the outage cycle.
Only issue I see is it would skew the priorities. A potential strategy I see would be to lie as much as possible to secure a lengthy first term, and just don't try for re-election.
The prospect of regular re-election is one of the systems that pushes our leaders towards actually trying. Once they no longer have to worry about it, they become much more powerful.
That's a good point. Usually you find out how someone actually rules once they're in power and it's often quite different than they campaigned.
Can you provide examples of this being "quite often?"
Most politicians are not lying to constituents when they run, and most politicians are heavily supported by constituents during their time in office.
"Politicians are all liars" is one of those things that's said a lot but not really borne out by data