I don’t mean to make this an ad hominem, but I think it is reasonable and important to hold our incumbent Delegate accountable. Griffindor — do you actually support term limits, or are you just submitting proposals for the sake of political appearances? Despite bringing forth two separate proposals, literally the only post in this topic you’ve liked is Amerion’s post saying that term limits are unnecessary.
I don’t like to throw around insinuations, but like, I’m talking about a guy who literally said a week ago that he voted ‘strategically’ in favor of removing the endorsements threshold for running for Delegate, even though he personally opposed the amendment, to maintain his own political appearances as an incumbent Delegate. I mean, you judge for yourself. If our incumbent Delegate — serving a record-long series of consecutive terms — intends to run for re-election but feels it’s politically untenable to say so, maybe we should question why it’s political untenable.
Maybe it’s been unnecessary because in our nearly a decade with our current Delegacy system, there has only ever been one single person who ran for more than two consecutive terms. Whether we explicitly called it out or not, it was a norm of our democracy. We created our current Delegate position with the express intent of avoiding an excessive concentration of power — and that includes the support that naturally comes from being at the top of the region page every single day. Without adequate checks and balances, that’s why we end up with a system where a challenger trailing by seven percentage points (five approvals) in the forum round can end up losing the gameside round by 39 votes. (By the way — that was a vote margin that apparently deserved to be reported in bold italics in a region-wide telegram praising their own “highly successful year-and-a-half-long tenure.” See what I mean by incumbency advantage?)
I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I most certainly do not feel entitled to the office. The assembly can recall me tomorrow or unelect me at the next election and I will be just fine, respect the region’s will, and leave office. I am a servent of the region and will serve until told not to do so.
Here is exactly where I stand on this:
I support term limits. If the assembly votes to establish them, then I will, of course, abide by them and even vote for them.
However, I do not like that certain members of the Assembly felt like having the conversation just days after the RMB voted in their poll and just a week after the citizens voted me their first-place candidate in the first round. It is certainly their right to have that discussion, though.
In addressing the “personality cult” argument… Hypothetically, our very own Concrete Slab would destroy me in the RMB Delegate election, not because they necessarily would have the better platform (though it’s possible), but because they have the better cult following. This cult didn’t come from being in the Delegacy, nor did mine; it came by simply being involved and active where the citizens could see you. Amerion, Penguin, and several other citizens have the same shot I do as they took the time to engage and built rapport with the RMB. They are not just doing a dog and pony show during the election season. The RMB is not a rubber stamp for the forums; they are a co-equal part of our region, and their vote should not be attributed to politics of personality. This most recent election was also my first time facing off against someone other than RON. The better question that should be asked is why we have candidates running unopposed. Politics of personality literally cannot be an argument for why I won any term since the first three were unopposed.
It may have been called a “whataboutism” argument when I brought up term limits for other positions, but it’s a legitimate conversation to be had. We have purposefully designed our system to have a figurehead Delegate so we get those we trust into the position and then reduce the risk of coups. We want this position to have less turnover (look at TNP for a good example of frequent turnover and Del Tips). As for Prime Minister, our de jure most powerful position, and the person with all the in-game powers, save WA, granted to them, Henn was PM for nearly 2/3rds of my time as Delegate. That is certainly not a knock against them, but that consequently meant there was also little room for others to actually MAKE new policies and govern during that time. The Delegate, by comparison, sits there and looks pretty until told to act.
The consolidation of power in the Delegacy argument also makes no sense to me; I hold very little de jure power, and my most potent de facto powers has been in decline for much of my tenure (and if the crash had not happened it would show even more drastically). And the Delegate, except in a few narrowly defined instances, can only exercise their powers when ordered to by others. No other RO position actually has that restriction. Between that and the personality cult argument, I don’t know which one is weaker.
You know… if you do the math on the number of approval votes as a percentage relative to total citizens voting… I got 71% of the forum vote (32/45) and only 60% of the RMB vote (95/159), which actually made the RMB more selective. That was even after an increase in participation of 45% in-game in the election poll. And yes, I know it’s two different voting systems, but the citizens could have just as easily not approved me in the first round.
So, to summarize, I have and will always respect the will of the assembly. I DO support term limits, but as part of a broader discussion of term limits and their merits in general across all positions, not just the one position that happened to have a reelected candidate. And NO, I will not be running for reelection unless the election features an essentially one-candidate race. The region deserves to have competition for the top job. This has been my internal deciding metric this whole time, and it is unfortunate that I had to run alone the first three times.
I’m glad to hear that you support term limits! Just for the sake of robust debate, though, I would like to address some of the counterarguments you raise.
I don’t view this amendment that way. Maybe it feels like it because no other Delegate in our current system ever ran for a third consecutive term, but I would support this amendment no matter who was Delegate, or who had been Delegate in the past. The impetus wasn’t your election, it was discussion on Discord pointing out that no incumbent Delegate has ever lost the second round (and after some digging, as far as I could tell, no incumbent has ever lost the first round either). That would be concerning to me even if you hadn’t won this time. But I felt that raising the idea of term limits during the election would come across as even more targeted
I can’t think of any way to describe this other than a non sequitur. I floated the idea of term limits on Discord because, as far as I could tell, an incumbent Delegate has never lost re-election, period. I do think that politics of personality show up more prominently in the second round because voters have to actually choose a single candidate to vote for, but if we held the second round as a first-past-the-post runoff here on the forums, I still think the election would be driven by politics of personality much more than I’d like.
The bottom line here is that term limits don’t prevent someone from running in the second round; they prevent someone from running in the whole election.
Even if this were true, it’s a property of your tenure, not of the system. It’s not an argument why the system doesn’t reward politics of personality. I think it does because in a nominally apolitical role, personal differentiation is a natural substitute for political differentiation.
But it’s also not entirely accurate. As Penguin mentioned on Discord (and I think you agreed? — apologies if that’s not what you meant), an incumbent’s candidacy can be a factor in dissuading competition. I don’t think it’s relevant to litigate whether this is what happened the times you ran for reelection, because it’s a broader property of a system with a strong incumbency advantage that the incumbent can dissuade others from running against them.
I don’t see the history that way. We designed our system in 2016, in the aftermath of Hileville’s coup. When Hileville ran for office, they were the incumbent Minister of Foreign Affairs and a member of the Committee for State Security. They’d served in a raft of other roles before, including Delegate, Chair of the Assembly, and Chief Justice. By many metrics, Hileville was a trusted member of our region.
What the historical record actually indicates is that having our Delegate serve as a head of state was proposed in 2016 because our prior system, where the Delegate was both the head of government and head of state, had “concentrated power in a small number of hands.” That’s the opposite goal of identifying a trusted figure to serve a multi-year tenure. The solution to concentrated power was separation of power — like, that’s the name of the thread from 2016. Term limits do precisely that by diffusing power away from a single person.
This is true de jure (except the Prime Minister doesn’t get border control powers), but the Delegate has all in-game powers available to them de facto. There’s only so much we can do to avoid a concentration of power with the Delegate in terms of game mechanics, but there are political guardrails we can put up, like term limits, to combat a concentration of power in other ways.
Of course the second round is more selective than the first, because in the first round voters can vote for multiple candidates. I don’t want to get too sidetracked from the actual proposals at hand, so I’ll just say that I don’t know what your numbers are meant to prove. If your vote share went from 71% to 60%, then Henn’s went from 60% to 35%, a decline over twice as large as yours.
I’m not necessarily talking about you though. You can’t guarantee that the next delegate who happens to want to serve for four consecutive terms won’t have any undemocratic inclinations, and we both know that the Assembly will be hard pressed to recall any official, let alone a Delegate, without a strong reasons.
Even if your (or future delegates’) intentions are benign, consecutive reelections potentially have a chilling effect that discourages other candidates.
I have had a day to sit and and think through the above discussion. I appreciate that we are all civil and that this is more so a discussion brought on more about norms than it is as to any one individual. With regards to the norms, I believe I am convinced on the strength of the aforementioned conversation that some term limits is a good measure.
I do have concerns, however, with the length of time we are sitting out candidates. A whole year is significant in NS-terms. I wonder if 6-months is not more appropriate?
I’m not sure I understand your point. The current draft says that someone who already served two consecutive terms cannot be elected to a third consecutive term. Your proposal says that one can’t hold two consecutive terms at all. Isn’t that more stringent?
I don’t feel too strongly about term limits. I’m not strictly opposed, but I also don’t think they solve the problem people think they solve, in most cases.
See, because this is absolutely wrong. Statistically, incumbent Delegates have won re-election and yes there is an inherent incumbency bias, particularly game-side, but there’s no inherent barrier to an incumbent defeat, nor is it in any way unfair to the democratic system. In fact, you could argue the opposite - by bringing in an arbitrary restriction, you’re limiting the democratic expression of people in who they would want to be Delegate again. Fudgetopia was Delegate for nearly 4 years because South Pacificans supported that.
If South Pacificans are supportive of Griff being Delegate for 4 or 5 terms, what’s wrong with that?
No, that’s wrong. Our structure diffuses power away from a single person; it has nothing to do with who holds which office for however long. And purely mechanically, it takes at most 6 months (and usually less) for a Delegate to reach their influence cap, so that it doesn’t matter if they’ve been in office for 6 months or 6 years in terms of their actual game-side power.
True, I had forgotten about that. I stand corrected. But even so, that’s a system where the will of the people is, at least kinda, reflected - since I have you as our regional historian here, were there situations in that system (which favors the incumbent even more than our current one) where the incumbent lost?
I can’t think of an example off the top of my head. You can’t deny that a Delegate has a near insurmountable advantage in an endorsements-only race. If their condition was so precarious that they’d lose their seat then they likely would’ve been forced to resign or decline to contest the challenge.
I wonder how much of a game-side poll gap is due to the sitting-Delegate’s incumbent advantage and how much can also be attributed to polling-bandwagoning. In any case, much like Roavin, I am also ambivalent about this proposal.
I don’t mean to cut off the debate–which I found quite illuminating–but it seems that there has been sufficient coalescence around Griff’s proposal (and no further competing alternatives), that it’s worth moving to a vote. Hence, I move this amendment to a vote.
That said, if folks would prefer to continue debating, I can withdraw my motion.
I’m kinda annoyed that absolutely noone took this fact into account (one of the rare cases where pronoun is wrong), or even acknowledged it, but it is what it is.
