Let’s think bigger than term limits It’s undeniable that democracy at the local level needs an overhaul.Take, for instance, the present tendency for overwhelming consensus at city hall. While most Ottawa residents find themselves divided on major issues – transit, condos, development — councillors find themselves agreeing with each other most of the time.
What about our council make up? Six of the 23 current councillors have been serving since 2001.
Long terms on council are made all the easier by the sizeable advantage that the incumbency offers to Ottawa’s municipal candidates. Incumbents rarely lose an election because, among other things, they often start with a sizeable name-recognition advantage.
It’s easy to be sympathetic with the push for term limits, an idea proposed now for Ottawa by Somerset Ward candidate Lili Weemen.
The hope is that more forced departures will open up more opportunities for candidates who otherwise wouldn’t get a shot: citizens who view public service as a calling, not a career; candidates who retain their constituents interest and ignore lobbyists. In short, by increasing turnover, we’d get a council that looked more like us.
But before we jump in, we should have a look at some of the evidence available about the effects of term limits.
Term limits would be new to Canada, but there are many state legislatures in the U.S. where term limits were instituted in the 1990s. The effects, however, have been disappointingly mixed.
Most analyses of American state legislatures have shown that term limits have not brought legislatures much more in line with local demographics. A study of all 50 states by two California State University professors concluded that there were only 1.54 per cent more women in term-limited assemblies. Another similar study of the country showed no statistically significant link between term limits and the representation of visible minorities and ethnic groups in assemblies.
Nor have they seemed to open up a road for a new type of citizen-legislator, as had been hoped. While proponents of term limits had anticipated the change would make way for representatives that spent only a portion of their lives in politics, the Public Policy Institute of California found that in their state the reform didn’t decrease the number of “career politicians.”
Instead, many legislators came from lower levels of government, and graduated onto higher levels when their term ended. Essentially, the term limited legislature just became one step on the rung. Summing up the available evidence, New York University professor Patrick Egan, wrote:“Term limits have not lead to the election of more women or racial minorities as legislators, nor have they been associated with election to office of legislators who are younger, less wealthy, less ideological, or less likely to already be politicians,” he wrote.
The promise of term limits was a great one. But the evidence shows that by and large, they didn’t have the effect that many proponents were hoping for. They haven’t meaningfully improved representation and they haven’t brought in citizen legislators.
So if we want to bring institutional change, we should think bigger.