About this part:<p>"Maybe Some Lies Are Necessary?"<p>In his book "10% Less Democracy" the economist Garret Jones pointed out that politicians make terrible decisions during election years, therefore, if we had longer terms in office, and therefore fewer elections, we'd have better government.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503628973/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/15...</a><p>Likewise, in 1787, Alexander Hamilton insisted that the USA President should be elected "for life, on good behavior." He imagined that having a leader commit to a country for life should lead to good governance, so long as the person could be easily removed if they behaved badly.<p>"Democracy For Realists" rounds up some of this thinking. While Achen and Bartels don't explicitly endorse longer terms in office, they do quote a lot of people who feel longer terms in office would lead to better government, and also more honest government.<p>I've been studying this issue and using a Substack as the dumping ground for my research notes. If you're interested, here is an excerpt where they talk about the struggle to add fluoride to municipal water, and the pushback the political leaders got:<p><a href="https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part-8-of" rel="nofollow">https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...</a><p>Here is an excerpt about the damage done by referendums, of the type that dominate in California:<p><a href="https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part-10-of" rel="nofollow">https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...</a><p>"<i>La Follette was eventually the 1924 Progressive candidate for president, but the anti-party spirit of that movement is already apparent in these remarks two dozen years earlier. As Key (1942, 373-374) put is, “The advocates of the direct primary had a simple faith in democracy; they thought that if the people, the rank and file of the party membership, only were given an opportunity to express their will through some such mechanism as the direct primary, candidates would be selected who would be devoted to the interests of the people as a whole.”</i><p><i>Some canny political scientists were immediately skeptical. For example, Henry Jones Ford (1909, 2) noted that</i><p><i>“One continually hears the declaration that the direct primary will take power from the politicians and give it to the people. This is pure nonsense. Politics has been, is, and always will be carried on by politicians, just as art is carried on by artists, engineering by engineers, business by businessmen. All that the direct primary, or any other political reform, can do is to affect the character of the politicians by altering the conditions that govern political activity, thus determining its extent and quality. The direct primary may take advantage and opportunity from one set of politicians and confer them upon another set, but politicians there will always be so long as there is politics.”</i><p>I include my own opinion in the Substack, which is that longer terms would help make for most honest government.<p>Achen and Bartels also offer a detailed look at a region of Illinois in which the public was invited to vote on the budget for the fire department. The public voted for the cheapest, least expensive budget they were offered. The public saved themselves a total of just $0.43 cents per family a year, while having to suffer from very slow response times from the fire department. This seems to be a clear example of the public sabotaging its own interests, when invited to vote on issues directly:<p><a href="https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part-12-of" rel="nofollow">https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...</a><p>Finally, here is the part where Achen and Bartels come close to suggesting that longer terms would allow politicians to be a bit more honest. They make the point that it was the politicians close to an election who were most likely to pander:<p><a href="https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part-13-of" rel="nofollow">https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...</a><p>"<i>For lower-level offices, however, a good deal of variation in term lengths remains, and it seems to have just the sort of consequences suggested by Hamilton and by Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts’s analysis. For example, elected officials facing the issue of fluoridating drinking water in the 1950s and 1960s were significantly less likely to pander to their constituents’ ungrounded fears when longer terms gave them some protection from the “sudden breezes of passion” that Hamilton associated with public opinion. Figure 4.3 shows the dramatic difference that longer terms made to mayoral support for fluoridation. Many political leaders, not caring deeply about the topic, ducked; but those with longer terms had more political leeway to do what was right, and a significant fraction of them used it.</i>"<p>It seems likely we could get a more honest kind of government if politicians were elected for a single very long term, of perhaps 15 or 20 years. The top judges in Britain are appointed for 18 years, so perhaps that is the ideal number when you want to ensure someone's independence, while still allowing the regular churn of generational change.