Comment on Make Congress Earn Average American Wage.

Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• IMALlama@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Michigan has term limits. It has not worked out well. It makes lobbying way easier, since the lawmakers aren’t very effective earlier in their career. You also wind up with two casts of politians: those who want to be public servants and are forced to run for a different office to keep good on the table and those who are already well heeled. We don’t need the second category in politics.

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  • Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I looked up Michigan’s term limits which is 12 years, which is honestly very long, so it led me to searching about corruption and here’s what I found:

    • Cross-state variation in U.S. term-limit regimes is used to estimate the opposing incidence and magnitude effects of term limits on corruption.
    • The penultimate effect of term limits increases corruption frequency by about 28 %.
    • The magnitude effect, stemming from shorter tenures, reduces the average cost of corruption.
    • Stricter term limits are associated with lower overall corruption.
    • Term limits thus serve as an institutional safeguard against political corruption.

    It is well established that lame-duck incumbents tend to be less accountable (Besley and Case, 1995, 2003), hence more prone to corruption, and Tsur (2022) showed that penultimate terms reinforce this effect. […] Corrupt activities typically require close and trusted relationships between the public officials involved in the malfeasance and the private actors offering bribes. This intimacy and trust do not develop overnight, but require time to cultivate. […] Consequently, such corrupt networks are often built gradually through repeated interactions, shared secrets, and a history of successful illicit transactions.

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