The last post argued that a democracy should make it easy to vote – that a system which imposes barriers to participation, and where those barriers fall disproportionately on citizens with the least resources and schedule flexibility, fails the Public Dignity Standard on all three counts.
But making it easier to vote raises an immediate follow-up question: easier to vote for whom?
If the system produces candidates that voters across the political spectrum consistently describe as self-serving, out of touch, and unresponsive to the people they represent, then increasing turnout without addressing candidate quality is like improving the roads to a destination nobody wants to reach. Access matters. So does what you find when you get there.
This post is about the second half of the democratic participation problem – not who can vote, but who ends up on the ballot, and why the current system makes it so difficult for genuinely good candidates to get there.
What Voters Actually Think
The polling on this is striking, and worth sitting with.
Roughly three-quarters of both Republican and Democratic voters say that members of Congress do a very or somewhat bad job of listening to the concerns of people in their district, keeping their personal financial interests separate from their political work, working with the opposing party, and taking responsibility for their actions. This is not partisan disagreement about policy. It is bipartisan agreement that the people holding office are not doing the job.
When asked why politicians run for office in the first place, voters on both sides give the same answer: to make money, to seek fame and attention, and to position themselves for higher office in the future. Less than 20 percent of Americans express confidence in Congress as an institution.
This is a remarkable level of shared dissatisfaction. And yet the system continues to produce the same results, election after election, because the problem is not simply who is running – it is the structural conditions that determine who can run, who wins, and who stays.
The Incumbent Problem
The most important structural fact about American electoral politics is one that rarely gets the attention it deserves: over the past 25 years, incumbents have won more than 90 percent of their races.
Think about what that means. In a system where the overwhelming majority of voters believe their representatives are doing a bad job, those representatives keep winning anyway. The public is frustrated. The public votes. And the public keeps returning to office the people it claims to be frustrated with.
This is not primarily a story about voter irrationality. It is a story about structural advantage. Incumbents have name recognition, established fundraising networks, staff, and the ability to use their office to generate media coverage. Challengers – particularly those without existing wealth or political connections – face a system tilted dramatically against them before the first vote is cast.
The result is an institution that is insulated from the accountability mechanisms that are supposed to keep it responsive. Members of Congress can consistently fail to do their jobs, as voters themselves assess it, and face minimal electoral consequences. That insulation is a design problem, not a character problem – and it requires a structural solution.
Applying the Standard
The Golden Rule Test asks whether we would design this system if we did not know which position we would occupy. Would a rational person, not knowing whether they would be an entrenched incumbent or a qualified challenger trying to enter public service, design a system in which incumbents win more than nine times out of ten regardless of their performance?
The answer is no. A rational person behind the veil of ignorance would want a system that actually allows the best available candidates to compete on something closer to equal footing – where performance in office affects the likelihood of staying in office, and where the barriers to entry for new candidates are proportionate to the public interest rather than calibrated to protect the people already inside.
The Outcomes Test is equally clear. A system designed to produce responsive, accountable representatives who serve the public interest is producing representatives that the overwhelming majority of the public assesses as failing on every relevant measure. By the standard of what it claims to produce, the current system is not working.
The Distal Test asks who is structurally excluded from running for office. The answer includes anyone without access to large fundraising networks – which means, in practice, people who have not spent years cultivating relationships with wealthy donors, people who cannot take months away from their income to run a campaign, people who lack the institutional support of existing political machines.
Age Limits vs. Term Limits
Two structural reforms have broad bipartisan support and deserve serious examination.
The first is age limits on candidates seeking office. Support for this idea is substantial – roughly 82 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats favor some form of age restriction. The intuition behind it is understandable: the median age of members of Congress has risen steadily for decades, and there is genuine public concern about whether representatives in their eighties and nineties can effectively serve constituents in a rapidly changing world.
But age limits are the wrong solution to a real problem. They are, in essence, a form of discrimination – they bar people from public service based on a characteristic rather than demonstrated capacity. A sharp, engaged 82-year-old is a better representative than a disengaged 45-year-old. What voters are actually concerned about is not age itself but the combination of age and entrenchment. The problem is not how old they are. It is how long they have been there.
Term limits address that problem more directly. Support is even higher – 90 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of Democrats favor them. Term limits would reduce the number of entrenched incumbents in each election cycle, creating more genuine competition and more opportunities for new candidates. They would likely lower the average age of representatives by preventing decades-long tenures. They would curb the accumulation of personal power and institutional influence among individual members. And they would send a signal – one the current system entirely lacks – that public office is a form of service rather than a career.
The primary objection is that term limits erode institutional knowledge and make governing more difficult. This is a real concern and not one to dismiss entirely. But it has to be weighed against the current alternative: an institution in which less than 20 percent of the public has confidence, in which representatives are widely assessed as self-serving and unresponsive.
Term limits are not cost-free. If they are implemented badly, they can weaken legislative expertise and increase dependence on lobbyists or permanent staff. That is why term limits should be paired with campaign finance reform, stronger public staffing, and rules that reduce outside influence.
The Path to Change
Term limits at the federal level would require a constitutional amendment – which is a high bar, but not an impossible one. The process can move through Congress with a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers, which is unlikely given that the people being asked to limit their own tenure are the same people who benefit from the current system.
But there is another path. Under Article V of the Constitution, a constitutional convention can be called if two-thirds of state legislatures – 34 states – pass resolutions requesting one. As of this writing, more than a dozen states have already done so specifically on the issue of term limits, through the Convention of States movement. If momentum continues to build, a convention becomes a genuine possibility.
This is not a quick fix. Constitutional processes move slowly, and a convention carries risks as well as possibilities. But the existence of a legitimate constitutional pathway, with genuine bipartisan public support, is more than exists for many needed reforms.
What Better Candidates Would Require
Term limits are one piece of the structural reform the system needs. But they are not sufficient on their own.
Even with term limits, the candidates who replace outgoing incumbents will still be drawn disproportionately from the pool of people with access to money and established political networks – unless we also address how campaigns are financed, how primaries work, and what the barriers to entry actually are for someone without existing wealth or connections who wants to serve.
Those are the topics of the posts that follow. Campaign finance reform – how we reduce the outsized influence of money in political campaigns – is next. After that, the structural question of how our electoral system itself could be redesigned to better translate citizen preferences into representation.
Each of these reforms is individually important. Together, they address what the polling has been telling us for decades: the problem is not only that bad people are running for office. It is that the system we have built makes it very hard for good people to get there – and very easy for the people already there to stay, regardless of how well they serve.
A democracy that produces representatives the public overwhelmingly assesses as self-serving and unresponsive is not failing because voters are making bad choices.
It is failing because the system is producing bad choices.
Recommended Reading
- Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy — a concise foundation for understanding democratic equality, participation, representation, and the institutions needed for democratic government.
- E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People — a classic work on how political conflict, organization, and unequal participation shape whose interests get represented.
- Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics — a major study of unequal political voice and why some citizens and groups are heard more clearly than others.
- Morris P. Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment — a classic account of congressional incumbency, electoral incentives, and why members of Congress are difficult to dislodge.
- David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection — a foundational work on how reelection incentives shape congressional behavior.
- Richard F. Fenno Jr., Home Style: House Members in Their Districts — a classic study of how members of Congress cultivate support, build trust, and maintain electoral security in their districts.
- Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost — an argument about money, dependence, and institutional corruption in American politics.
- Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch — an analysis of institutional dysfunction in Congress and the erosion of legislative accountability.
- Lee Drutman, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop — a reform-oriented analysis of how the two-party system intensifies polarization and limits voter choice.
- Pippa Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters — a comparative account of why electoral design, trust, administration, and integrity matter for democratic legitimacy.