The coming German election may be the last one run on a four-year cycle. The parties now represented in the German parliament and at least one that stands to enter it on Saturday all agree that the legislative term should be extended to five years. That means it’s highly likely Germany will make the switch before 2021. They make some arguments that Americans, too, should consider.
Since the end of World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany has only had eight chancellors, and three of them served for more than a decade; Angela Merkel will match Helmut Kohl’s 16-year record if she wins next week. But, unlike, say, in Russia, where the presidential term was increased from four to six years in 2008 specifically to extend President Vladimir Putin’s tenure, the emerging German consensus is not about a longer political life for leaders. It’s about the kind of calm common sense Germany’s political class proudly demonstrates to the rest of the Western world in these colorful times.
Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, points out that the election campaign takes time out of a government’s productive term, and coalition negotiations postelection take some more. The coalition talks lasted a record 86 days in 2013 and they may take even longer this time around. In the US, coalition talks aren’t a problem, but the campaigns themselves are insanely long. From the moment the first serious candidate, Ted Cruz, announced he was running, the campaign for the last presidential election went on for 597 days.
The Social Democrats, Merkel’s coalition partners, point out that some pieces of legislation are so complex that they require more deliberation time than the current cycle affords. That, too, is an argument to which Americans should be receptive. A new US president generally has only a two-year window of opportunity before the mid-term Congress elections, which often leave the president struggling against a hostile legislature. Hence the Republicans’ helpless flailing on health care this year: They know there’s not enough time to work out acceptable proposals, but they still try various hastily thrown together schemes because they hate the status quo.
Germany’s smaller parties, such as the far-left Die Linke and the Greens, hope to combine a longer legislative period with more elements of direct democracy, such as popular votes on certain issues. If these parties want to hold more direct votes, it makes even more sense to decrease the frequency of national ones, because high vote frequency depresses turnout, as US political scientist Richard W. Boyd described in the 1980s. More recently, University of Dortmund’s Sebastian Garmann has provided strong empirical evidence in support of the causal link between election frequency and turnout.
To increase turnout, the frequency of elections should be reduced. This finding is particularly relevant for many countries in which, for example, local and national elections are held on different days -- as is the case for Canada, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, to name just a few. Moreover, it is relevant for countries such as the United States and Switzerland, which have -- due to the roles played by primaries and referenda -- a very high frequency of contests.
Even without popular votes, Germany has something of a falling turnout problem: For most of the country’s post-war history, more than 80 percent of voters took part in federal elections, but in the last two contests, that share had dropped to about 70 percent. It may even drop below that mark for the first time ever on Sept. 24 if voters decide Merkel’s formidable poll lead is too wide for their ballots to matter.
This increase in apathy still doesn’t bring Germany close to the US, where between 50 and 60 percent of voting-age citizens typically vote in a presidential election, despite the relentless media hype and the billions of dollars spent on persuading people to vote one way or another. Changing national election cycles probably won’t impact this. Garmann found that there was no voter fatigue effect for federal elections and that voter fatigue “fades approximately six months after an election.” There are better reasons, though. One of them is cost.
Budget savings are part of the reason the German city state of Bremen has introduced a measure to increase the state legislature’s term from four to five years -- in line with the other German states. There can be no more costly elections than those in the American system; less frequency might slightly moderate the enormous waste of resources on saturation political advertising.
It’s not entirely accidental that, globally, more countries have a five-year electoral cycle than a four-year one, and only a handful have adopted even shorter ones. These countries suffer from frenetic, fruitless political activity, and that’s a source of frustration; in Australia, with its three-year electoral terms, there is strong support for moving to four years.
It is, of course, a bad time for many Americans to discuss changing the election cycle: Half the country can’t wait to be rid of President Trump. But with less frequent elections, Americans might choose a little more carefully. Adding just one year to the cycle doesn’t really make politicians less accountable than they are today, but it might make for saner politics. Those practical Germans, at least, intend to find out.
By Leonid Bershidsky
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. -- Ed.
