Democratic constitutions allow citizens to hold officeholders accountable via election. Legislative elections are typically held either by the calendar or at the legislature’s own discretion, i.e., “no confidence”. But both are inferior to a third option: having citizens decide when the next election will be. This procedure, “Term Accountability”, optimally aligns policymaker motivations with citizen interests. Ideally, pathological legislatures would serve short terms while productive legislatures would serve long terms.

Our generation is familiar with contesting and perfecting constitutional practices as they pertain to citizen rights. But there is an apparent intellectual bias against institutional revision. This supports a presumption that institutional revision is illegitimate, if not utopian. Applied philosophy is permitted to evaluate actual institutions however. This paper can be read as the applied philosophy of applied philosophy. As an intellectual discipline philosophy is obligated to imagine counter-factual practices that better satisfy justified standards of evaluation.