Eligibility Requirements

Can limits on who can participate improve office holders?

This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.

We require a license before you can drive a car. If it weren't for the second amendment, half of the states would require extensive training programs to buy a gun. You have to earn a Ph.D. before you're allowed to teach undergraduates. You need to pass the CPA exam to be able to file someone's taxes.

But you can run for Representative to the US Congress as soon as you hit 25, no license or training required.

The history of actors becoming politicians is extensive and stretches back at least the 1940s when John Davis Lodge won a seat in the House and then a Governorship. The history of charismatic people with zero government experience thinking they can fix Washington goes back even farther. Should we really keep letting amateurs run for office? Sometimes Zaphod Beeblebrox seems right around the corner.

Setting aside for a moment that comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy might be on the short list of most heroic leaders of the 21st century, it seems entirely reasonable to wonder whether we really want to allow any village idiot to run our government. The Romans and Greeks both had significant limitations on who could be elected. Occasionally you see proposals for greater eligibility requirements for high office, often framed around the question of who should be allowed to be President.

These articles often get written in direct response to some candidate who the author thinks is unqualified. Obviously this one’s white whale was Donald Trump. It's interesting to see the specific proposals that the author came up with as ways to keep Trump from office:

Should a candidate be required to undergo psychological testing to determine mental competence?

Should a candidate be required to undergo a complete financial review, ranging from perusal of a simple credit report to a full examination of all tax returns, bankruptcies and lawsuits?

Should a candidate and his or her family members be investigated for ties to foreign powers?

Should a candidate’s moral behavior, including alleged sexual harassment or aberrant off-the-bus conversations with B-list celebrities about manhandling women be considered?

The obvious and immediate challenge to this sort of idea is simple: who would you trust to evaluate these questions?

This is the fundamental challenge with most eligibility requirements. Either they're broad enough to allow most people in, including the particularly terrible person the author was hoping to prevent, or they're narrow enough that they grant excessive power to the adjudicators. Who among us couldn't fail a mental competence test if the adjudicator disliked us enough? Imagining the extensive list of requirements we could put together, we should also ask the question: if an adjudicator can be appointed who can determine these all faithfully, why stop at asking them to pick our candidates? Why not just ask them to pick the winner!

The most salient recent experience with eligibility requirements are poll tests used in the South. Many argue that these were designed by white people with the deliberate goal of disenfranchising former slaves. So we know that they can be used as weapons pointed at political enemies.

The second significant challenge with eligibility requirements is that they raise doubt about whether they qualify as self-governance. One of the core claims of democracy is that anyone can run for office and participate in government. If you have to jump through a set of hoops, and especially if those hoops are controlled by your ideological enemies, we walk away from the idea that anyone can participate. Those who are not eligible become second class citizens within a society that seeks to govern itself.

Eligibility requirements can be traced back to a true belief and a noble goal. Some people are significantly less likely to succeed in the tasks of government. We probably shouldn't elect those people. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to find a neutral, abuse-free way to eliminate those people within a system where voting is the mechanism of choice.

Limiting who can be selected can be entirely reasonable in other scenarios. We only select from judges and lawyers for the position of judge. We expect prior relevant experience to be hired as a senior bureaucrat. Most CEOs of large companies have run large and important departments.

These requirements are reasonable because they are broad enough to be meritocratic - they don't clearly exclude meritorious candidates, regardless of demographics, nor are they clearly able to be weaponized against political enemies. There are certainly incompetent people who make it through because of privilege, but far fewer if we selected purely on political connectedness, ability to charm, or randomly.

When we pair broad limits like these with a random selection method, they become even more reasonable. Imagine randomly choosing our next Supreme Court Justice from the ranks of all Appellate judges. Or randomly selecting who will create a new tax policy proposal from the set of people who have worked in tax policy.

Note: I have put forward a proposal for a stronger form of sortition as a useful governance tool. I call the technique 2xR. Eligibility requirements are potentially more useful within that context.