The Incentive Structure of Election and Re-Election
Democracy likes to congratulate itself on elections. This is understandable. Elections are preferable to succession by blood, rule by uniform, or instruction from a hereditary imbecile in ceremonial dress. They allow governments to be dismissed without civil war. They create at least the possibility of accountability. They remind rulers, now and then, that the public is not livestock. All that is true. It is also incomplete. For elections do not merely discipline power. They also shape it. They do not simply choose office-holders after the fact; they train office-seekers beforehand. They reward certain habits of mind, certain reflexes of speech, certain ways of seeing the world. And once politics becomes a profession, elections cease to be periodic tests of public trust and become the atmospheric condition in which the professional politician lives, breathes, calculates, flatters, evades, survives, and decays.