Bring Back Triumvirates
I'm gonna give this my usual disclaimer for electoral-systems posts: I really enjoy thinking about electoral systems, but I think it's a hobby like doing crosswords, it has only a superficial relationship to the real world. If you actually want to change the way we vote you need to dedicate 7+ years of your life to 1) persuasion and 2) figuring out what normal people actually care about. I think that's very admirable, an extremely important and potentially high-leverage way to affect policy outcomes, because a polity's choice of electoral system determines many of their substantive political outcomes. But personally I just want to write blogposts, so here you go instead.
Basically: I wonder if we should bring back triumvirates. Instead of having 1 president we could have 3. Each one has a six year term, and every 2 years we vote for a new president to join the group.
I see (at least) three issues with modern presidential systems which this might solve:
1) modern presidencies create way more see-sawing than I think is optimal. I love the thermostatic element of democracy, if things go too far one way then (ideally) the electorate will respond by voting in someone to take things back the other way, and we can keep iterating and modulating to get to the right answers. But I want those policy shifts to look like sinusoidal curves, not jagged zigzags, and currently our system is built to switch suddenly from one party to the next.
In practice there is some "policy drag" from the civil service etc, so the new president doesn't actually get to enact their chosen policies immediately, but that's not ideal either. Triumvirates might let the cumulative Will of the People get implemented, but in a smoother way over time.
2) modern presidencies thrust people directly into an incredibly hard job that they can't actually prepare for. You can be Vice President or Governor or whatever before you're president, but they're honestly just not the same job: being The Decider is a whole different thing.
If we had a triumvirate then presumably the most senior president can be the Chief President, and the other two presidents can learn on the job more meaningfully.
3) I honestly hate the feeling that we pick Presidents at a specific moment in time and then give them 4-7 year terms, and that elections are influenced by the economy and the weather and the luck of international relations, and that it often feels like if we had voted 6 months earlier or 6 months later things might have broken the other way.
Voting every couple years would be kind of hellish, I know, and create a near-permanent presidential election cycle, but it would mean that the presidency reflected more of a rolling average of the popular will, which to me seems a better reflection of What The People Want than having the desires of a particular Tuesday determine the leadership of the next four years.
Heck, we don't actually have to stop at tri-umvirating: a quinquevirate might reflect the long-term popular will even better. We could toggle the numbers and the voting cadence, but the biggest step is probably just moving away from a single person to any umvirate at all.
Would this system be bad? How would it be bad? Let me know in the comments.