Dual mandate
Thus, if someone who is already mayor of a town or city councillor becomes elected as MP or senator at the national or state legislature and retains both positions, this is a dual mandate.
In most states, membership of an independent judiciary or civil service generally disqualifies a person from simultaneously holding office in the executive or the legislature.
[2] Some advocated banning it, arguing that MEPs who were national MPs were often absent from one assembly in order to attend the other[2] (indeed, the early death of Peter Michael Kirk was blamed by his election agent on overwork resulting from his dual mandate[3]).
A recent example is Dr Kerryn Phelps who maintained her position as a Councillor on the City of Sydney Council while sitting in Federal Parliament as the Member for Wentworth between 2018 and 2019.
The British Columbia legislature had debated a "Dual Elected Office Prohibition Act" which failed to pass second reading.
Other prominent federal politicians with double mandates included George-Étienne Cartier, Christopher Dunkin, Hector Langevin, the second Premier of British Columbia Amor de Cosmos, and two members from Manitoba, Donald Smith and Pierre Delorme.
[14] Another famous example is that of the de facto leader of the Liberals, George Brown, who ran for both federal and provincial seats in 1867.
Holding a seat in the Senate, National Assembly, or European Parliament gives local mayors a valuable method of tapping funds to develop their home cities and regions.
[29] For politicians with national ambitions, retaining a position in a local town can give them a down-to-earth aura that can appeal to voters.
There are several reasons for this phenomenon, and one of them is that France has a long tradition of centralization, compared to countries such as Germany, Italy, and Spain.
During this same time, Chirac also served as a deputy in the National Assembly from Corrèze, briefly as Member of the European Parliament, and even as Prime Minister between 1986 and 1988.
This rule was more or less upheld by Jacques Chirac during the governments of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Dominique de Villepin for the 2002–2007 term, with a few notable exceptions (Jean-François Copé was mayor of Meaux, Nicolas Sarkozy was President of the Hauts-de-Seine General Council); for instance, Philippe Douste-Blazy had to step down from the Toulouse mayorship upon joining the government.
As of 2007[update], no such rule was stated for the François Fillon government: Alain Juppé, former Minister for Development was mayor of Bordeaux, and was defeated in his National Assembly constituency (a third cumulative mandate) by 50.9% to 49.1% of the votes by the Socialist candidate.
The instability caused by the close result of the 1981 general election was exacerbated by the number of government TDs who also served as MEPs and for whom the opposition refused pairing when they were abroad.
The 2003 Act provided that a candidate elected simultaneously to a forbidden combination of local councils has three days to choose which seat to take up, with the other or others then being considered vacant.
An example includes Mark Villar who vacated his newly won congressional seat in order to become Secretary of Public Works and Highways in 2016.
[42] In Poland, dual mandate is mostly limited to combining the role of a member of parliament with positions of minister or vice-minister (state secretary).
Per the Spanish Constitution, legislators in the regional assemblies of the Autonomous Communities are barred from being elected to a seat in the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Cortes Generales.
[44] In 2012 Sinn Féin committed to end dual jobbing, with Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness resigning his Westminster seat in 2013.
[52] The system came under scrutiny in the 2020s, with former leader of the Scottish Conservatives Douglas Ross facing criticism for double jobbing as the MP for Moray and the MSP for the Highlands and Islands from 2021 to 2024.
[57] Thus Ken Livingstone remained MP for Brent East until the dissolution of Parliament despite his election as Mayor of London a year before.
The United States Constitution prohibits members of the Senate or House from holding positions within the Executive Branch (Art.
Historically, the U.S. inherited many basic political traditions from Great Britain, which in the eighteenth century tolerated several different forms of dual mandate.
At the time, this was a largely uncontroversial practise since it was widely assumed that the Congress would have relatively little to do (especially in peacetime) and that most of the consequential decision-making would take place at the state and local levels.
A ban on dual mandates would therefore have been widely seen as unnecessary and unwelcome as it would have effectively barred Congressional delegates from what were perceived to be more important political posts, thus making election to the national Congress (already seen as a considerable burden due to the difficulties of eighteenth century travel) quite undesirable.
During the convention that established the present U.S. constitution, attention was primarily given to designing a federal government with branches that would be able operate independently of each other and free of undesirable foreign influence, which resulted in the aforementioned prohibitions.
This created the potential for conflicts of interest and made it increasingly difficult to justify the holding of mandates at different levels of government to voters.
At the time that the legislation first passed, there were some twenty elected officials who served in the New Jersey Legislature and another elected office, including Assemblyman Bill Pascrell, who was also mayor of Paterson, New Jersey; State Senator Ronald Rice, who also served on the Newark City Council; and Assemblyman John E. Rooney, who was also mayor of Northvale.
[62] A newspaper called former State senator Wayne R. Bryant the "king of double dipping" because he was collecting salaries from as many as four public jobs he held simultaneously.
[65] Senators: Assembly members: In February 2001, Jean Schmidt introduced legislation in the Ohio House of Representatives that would forbid public officials from receiving a government pension while still serving in office.
