Your hypotheses about why politicians do not back up their promises with risk for them certainly sound very nice, but you neglected to mention the most obvious one, the one most congruent with the facts: politicians are hypocrites (many of them Social Dominant / psychopaths) — they know they make grandiose promises and they have no intention of fulfilling them once they are elected.

Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct one. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I have a feeling that the main reason these ideas are not implemented is simply their “kookiness”. Candidates who propose radical changes like these get written off.

A politician could campaign with very little emphasis on this aspect of their platform, and then hope that their increased fidelity to their promises would get them reelected. This isn’t a great strategy for a newcomer, but you might expect it would have succeeded *somewhere*.

The only institutions of personal authority in the present U.S. political system that I can think of are judges and presidential vetoes. The former are often not elected democratically

Fixed that for you. It really varies from place to place whether judges are appointed or elected.

To illustrate:

The way this question has been framed has been to ignore the interests of the middle, which does not make its choice until later. The middle prefers no commitment, but is forced to make a binary choice.

Unfortunately choices are made in an incomplete set of options.

For example, Candidate A will commit to never raise taxes, but is strangely silent on whether to balance a budge or run a huge deficit.

Candidate B commits to balance the budget, and is silent about taxes and spending.

Candidate A is also silent about what is a tax…is a copay for medicare a new tax on seniors, is it a cost shift rather than a tax, is mandating state spending by the federal governement which shifts costs back to the state a tax increase at the state level; is a private mandate a tax increase?

The point is: you get fooled just when you think there is a commitment or promise, because there is a vast open set of non-commitments which get you back to the starting point or accomplish the same thing, or give you something you would never have chosen in the first place if it was set against the thing that was “promised”.

Exactly. Politicians go out of their way to /not/ commit to things precisely because they do not need to compete X*Y up to the credible guarantee level.

Now if we had Knightian, perfectly indistinguishable candidates in every respect (same blow-dried hair, same southern twang) but for their promises (X) and credibility (Y), we might observe creative forms of guarantee.

“Remember, you can’t be wrong unless you take a position. Don’t fall into that trap.” – Scott Adams, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook