Locally Uncompetitive

Via Ryan Avent, David Scheicher has an interesting paper about the lack of partisan competition in elections for city council races:

Despite the attention given to the anticompetitive effects of gerrymandering on national and state elections, little notice is paid to the least competitive legislative elections in America: its city council elections. In cities with partisan elections, individual competitive seats are rarer than at the national level and there is almost never competition for partisan control of councils. Nonpartisan city council elections are even worse, with virtually undefeatable incumbents and no policy competition of any kind. The dominant explanation in the political science literature for this phenomenon is that the lack of partisan competition in local elections is a result of the issues at play in local politics. Local politics, the argument goes, is not ideological - it is only about the competence with which public goods are provided and the allocation of these goods to different groups. This claim cannot stand up to scrutiny. Debates over issues like policing strategy and urban development are ideological, and voters do have beliefs about them, but there is still no partisan competition.

This paper argues that the explanation for the lack of partisan competition in city council elections lies in the laws governing these elections. Several laws - by my definition “unitary party rules” - serve to ensure that the national parties are on the ballot in local elections and that candidates, activists and voters do not defect from dominant national parties during local elections. When combined with the little information available about individual council candidates, the existence of the national party heuristic on local ballots crowds out other information and the laws create severe barriers to entry for potential local parties. The result is that the vote in city council elections directly tracks the vote in national elections, despite strong empirical evidence that voters have very different beliefs about local and national issues. In cities in which one party dominates at the national level, there is no competition. Thus, local legislatures are extremely unrepresentative of voter preferences and have little democratic legitimacy. Repealing the unitary party rules would spur a rearrangement of the two-party system at the local level and create party competition at the local level.

The basic issue is that beliefs about national issues don't map well onto beliefs about local issues. The Progressives thought the solution to this was non-partisan local elections, and until recently I thought so, too, but the research indicates that the situation is even worse in non-partisan election cities. I always found the choice voting system used to elect the Cambridge, MA City Council to be pretty appealing and wonder if it would, in some ways, help bring about what non-partisan local elections were supposed to achieve.

Comments

Oddly, the Cambridge system doesn't have a lot of turnover - there's been at least one election in the last 10 years where all 9 members were re-elected; you'd think that there would be more change at the margins in a system where you only need 10% of the total electorate's support to get a seat.

Posted by Nathan Williams | May 4, 2008 9:16 PM

"The basic issue is that beliefs about national issues don't map well onto beliefs about local issues."

Why in the world not? Shouldn't the issues track?What sort of local issues don't lead to similar kinds progressive and conservative philosophies about redistribution of income, the value of government solutions to problems, and church-state relationships, etc, just like at the national level?

I'm open for answers to these questions... but the statement certainly needs more explanation... don't you think?

Posted by Jim G | May 4, 2008 9:44 PM

As Walter Dean Burnham says, parties are the transmission belt of democracy, aggregating and giving effective expression to opinion. There's nothing at all wrong with partes per se (quite the opposite), its just the 2 crappy parties we're saddled with right now that make parties look bad.

Posted by Junius Brutus | May 5, 2008 12:08 AM

Nathan: in Cambridge there is a City Council, but also a professional City Manager. The mayor is basically an honorary post with extra benefits, but also the chore of chairing the School Committee (itself a thankless post). The second body changes more than the first b/c it is more of a decision-making body.

Posted by dan k | May 5, 2008 1:26 AM

I agree with Junius Brutus. In fact, historically in the US political parties arose as coalitions of parties mainly operating at the state level and holding local offices. For example, in Chicago the Democrats have always been more concerned with getting the "right" people elected as Alderman than into Congress. Keep the Democrats and Republicans from entering local elections and you kill the two parties. Which may not be a bad thing.

Someone should look seriously into why local elections in the US are so uncompetitive. New York City adopted term limits for its offices in the early 1990s. Since then there has been turnover on the City Council, due to term limits. I don't recall any councilmen being defeated for reelection, or there being much turnover prior to turn limits. There is almost no turnover in the NY state legislature, which does not have turn limits.

This tells me that in New York, the only way you can get an incumbent out of a local legislative office is term limits, not elections. But how? Is it actual vote manipulation, ie tampering with the machines, "walking around money", the financing system, collusion between the parties, or ballot access rules? Its not that people are that satisfied with their legislatures, as evidenced by the fact that voters in New York City have repeatedly frustrated efforts to do away with term limits, so they want turnover, but seem unable to get turnover by voting for challengers in elections.

Posted by Ed | May 5, 2008 2:37 AM

The big problem with nonpartisan elections, from my perspective, is that a small core of town/county pols and activists who make it their business to know the nuances of each candidate's record, while everyone else votes on hunches, vague name recognition, the nicest yard sign, etc. Or offers up a donkey vote.

In short, 'nonpartisan' becomes 'non-policy'. Even if there's not a clean mapping from the national party model, there needs to be some way to distinguish tree-huggers from tree-choppers.

If you're not going to have party identification, then the obvious alternative is to have some kind of list model, whether officially or unofficially sanctioned.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | May 5, 2008 12:51 PM

I would like to see a comparison of cities/counties with by-district election vs. at large elections.

Seattle has at large elections, and one of our theories for our light turnover, is that it is too expensive to advertise to the entire city to get good new candidates. Last time we had an opening by appointment, we had over a 100 people nominated, so there's certainly interest in serving on the city council.

The county around Seattle is in the middle of a decennial charter review, and a bunch of us are using this as an opportunity to get them to add IRV to the county voting procedures. Wish us luck.

Posted by sherrold | May 5, 2008 4:05 PM

Or offers up a donkey vote.

Is this the political equivalent of a donkey punch?

Posted by matt foley | May 7, 2008 7:16 PM