EXPIRISM:The Political Philosophy of Expiring Authority

Democratic elections authorize political officeholders, but electoral authorization does not establish that every subsequent exercise of discretionary power remains epistemically justified, institutionally competent, or socially tolerable. Conventional accountability mechanisms frequently evaluate political failure after the relevant decision has been implemented. In some circumstances, however, the consequences of failure are irreversible, and the institutional capacity to correct the decision may itself be destroyed. This paper introduces Expirism, a proposed theory of performance-conditional political authority. Its central claim is that electoral authorization should not entail an invariant entitlement to exercise unilateral discretionary power throughout an electoral term. Instead, specified decision-making authorities should be subject to expiration, conditional renewal, and proportionate restriction according to independently assessed performance, decision-specific risk, and constitutional safeguards. Drawing on Hayek’s knowledge problem, Mises’s economic calculation critique, Popper’s critical rationalism, Buchanan and Tullock’s constitutional political economy, Ostrom’s polycentric governance, and Pettit’s contestatory republicanism, Expirism develops an institutional model of political power that is neither technocratic rule nor unrestricted electoral majoritarianism. The framework introduces five mechanisms: an Authority Expiration Rule, a Public Decision Ledger, a Performance-Conditional Authority Transition, a Symmetric Ruin Gate, and a Polycentric Contestation Protocol. Its distinctive proposal is that documented performance failures can trigger legally predefined restrictions on particular discretionary powers without automatically removing an elected official from office. Conversely, improved performance and successful review can restore restricted authority. The paper develops the theory’s normative foundations, formal structure, constitutional constraints, falsifiable propositions, and potential failure modes. It does not claim empirical validation or demonstrate that its institutional design outperforms existing democratic arrangements. Its contribution is a testable proposal for transforming political accountability from retrospective judgment alone into a continuous, constitutionally constrained relationship between evidence, risk and authority.