Schleicher's Model of One-Party Democracy
As promised, Volokh guest blogger David Schleicher posted his preferred explanation for the persistence of one-party urban democracy. As first glance, his story seems pretty different from mine. Here’s his lead-in: “I argue that the lack of competition in city council elections can only be explained by understanding the laws governing local elections and how they interact with voter behavior.”
At least on my reading, though, election laws play no fundamental role in Schleicher’s story; it’s his assumptions about “voter behavior” assumptions that matter. And I’m pleased to report that Scheicher and I turn out to be roughly on the same page. He explains:
[T]he vote in local elections will directly track the vote in national elections. Voters with little information will use the information that the law provides to them – the party name on the ballot. If “Republican” and “Democrat” provide a non-zero amount of information about a candidate, a voter with no other information (by assumption) about the candidate will rationally use the national party heuristic to vote.
The question is why the minority local party doesn’t modify its issue stances to become popular at the local level. By assumption, the only way it could do this is if it did so on a city-wide level – individual candidates can’t get enough attention…
Schleicher closes with a great anecdote:
The dramatic effect of the lack of information on local city council elections can be seen if one considers the case of New York City’s Councilmanic District Five on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In the 2001 local election, Gifford Miller, a powerful and well-known Democratic incumbent who directly after the election would become Speaker of the City Council, faced a relatively unknown candidate named Robert Strougo. Not surprisingly, Miller won 68 percent of the vote to Strougo’s 31 percent, neatly tracking the 2-1 dominance of Democrats in the district.
In 2005, a perfect storm of factors lined up to reverse this result. First, Miller could not run for reelection because of term limits. His aide, Jessica Lappin, who had never run for public office before, was the Democratic candidate. Second, Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg reached new heights of popularity, particularly on the Upper East Side (he would end up winning 59 percent of the citywide vote and more than 80 percent of the vote on the Upper East Side). In District Five, the Republicans nominated Joel Zinberg, a former Democrat, cancer surgeon and Yale-educated lawyer, who built his candidacy around Bloomberg’s popularity, declaring his goal as furthering the Mayor’s agenda. The New York Times and the New York Post endorsed Zinberg, as did Bloomberg. In the face of this, Lappin’s campaign simply sounded a single theme. When asked by a local paper what differentiated the candidates, she responded, “I’m a Democrat. I mean, that’s sort of the most obvious difference between us… He’s a Republican, and I’m proud to be a Democrat, and I think that certainly distinguishes us.”
The result of the election was a near carbon copy of the 2001 race: Lappin received 65 percent of the vote to Zinberg’s 35 percent.
My only quibble is that my “party preference” mechanism seems to fit the facts better than Schleicher’s “lack of information” story. He could naturally reply that “party preference” is based on “lack of information,” but I’m not so sure. Why can’t we just look upon New York Democrats as the political equivalent of the New York Yankees?
The post appeared first on Econlib.
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