One major issue common to all democratic variants (to which autocracies are immune), is that elected officials have strong incentives to be short-sighted in their proposals and actions — to maximise perceived short-term gains at the expense of long-term progress. That is because they focus on re-election and the popularity of their parties and allies in the near future, instead of the common good in the long run.
One way to fix that would be deferring rewards for elected officials: holding a significant chunk of their salaries, bonuses and pensions for a period of time, and releasing that only if their administration is deemed “successful” with the benefit of hindsight, or releasing part of those funds in proportion to their “performance” while in office.
That should encourage politicians, to a certain extent, to make sure their policies are designed for long-term results.
There are some practical problems with this idea, though.
Money isn’t that important
Salaries and pensions attached to government positions are only part of what motivates people to run for office — the least important part, at certain levels of government.
How to defer the rest of the package, the “perks” (prestige, influence, public recognition, the launch pad for future jobs, etc)?
Long long-term
In many areas of public life, one or two electoral cycles are not enough to judge the wisdom of decisions. eg, a boost in education or science may take a generation, or even longer, to show its benefits; the wiseness of adhering to a certain power bloc, or to a particular school of thought in economics, is judged by History.
How to make sure politicians receive their rewards (or public scolding) soon enough; ie, before they are dead, or before they can enjoy those rewards?
Perhaps the heirs of politicians could have the rights to those rewards, or part of them. The Mayor of the city would receive (or not) his/her “public duty bonus” after, say, ten years; but if it takes longer to evaluate some of his/her actions, then his/her heirs would receive (or not) the rest of it after fifty years or more.
It would not be an immoral advantage for those descendants: in current systems, sons and grandsons of a famous politician benefit indirectly from the money and connections of that person anyway; the same way that heirs of rich people inherit fortunes without any merits of their own.
Besides, this approach would fit nicely with the Darwinian motivation to gain wealth and fame: if people have that impulse because (at a primitive level) being rich and popular increases their chances of mating successfully and the rate of success of their offspring, this is just a step in that direction. We can suspect that even selfish, cynic politicians would put their descendants and the honour attached to their surname before short-term personal gains. Appeal to hubris and family self-interest.
The difficulty of judging
How to define “success”, “failure” and “performance” in this context?
What makes someone deserve a score of 0 (or 10) for their work in government?
Who is to judge?
Can a society identify a discrete set of “aspects” with all these characteristics:
- Critically important to society and progress (ie, uncontroversial, non-partisan).
eg, positive economic growth, peace instead of war, higher life expectancy (the vast majority of people would agree on the right direction); vs. fewer marijuana users, lower attendance to religious services, fewer immigrants gaining citizenship (very open to ideological debate). - Timeless.
eg, “number of new books printed” seems a good indicator of cultural progress… unless physical books disappear and neural implants become the norm. - Measurable (thus comparable, numerically).
eg, moral progress, happiness, justice would be hard to measure objectively (but they seem so important).
And, because these “aspects” will change at some point anyway, no matter how hard we try to define them now: what will be the rules to change them, how many at a time, how often? If the formal set of criteria by which politicians will be scored changes arbitrarily, too often, or by the action of another politician, then the system would defeat itself.
“Not my fault”
How to exclude external factors when evaluating the long-term performance of elected officials? Events outside their control (wars, outbreaks, disrupting technology, meddling by powerful companies or by other cities/regions/countries) will distort their performance.
How to compensate for that?
(Originally posted on Apr 2017 as a GitHub issue of Robin Berjon’s project politi.es)
