I very much agree on the problem of one-party government, which happens all over the place, but, for LA then, how do these proposed reforms get implemented? Is the idea to do a proposition that is voted on by LA voters? Or would it be a statewide thing for all city councils in California? I'm not sure how you persuade turkeys to vote for Christmas if the current city council have to approve such measures.
I agree with the recommendations here on principle, but I’m not sure how they’ll solve the fundamental problem, especially in LA, which I think is the absence of local news media. San Francisco has notably higher turnout and also more sharply drawn political coalitions - for better or worse, candidates who are better on housing have also tended to be more deferential to SFPD (the “moderates”) and candidates who are more suspicious of the police are also more suspicious of development (the “progressives”). When I lived in LA, school board elections seemed polarized between pro-union and pro-charter forces, and an incumbent, Steve Zimmer, even lost his seat, which seems like a sign some information on policy differences was making it to voters. But on city council stuff, there’s no reliable information at all - I think more and better local media is a necessary component of the solution.
Also, I have gone to Glendale from West Hollywood by bus, and oh my god, by the time I got back I had outwitted a cyclops and heard the song of the sirens.
I came from a very red place and moved to a very blue place (though I live in a purple district). It’s amazing to see the similar types of stagnation that can occur when one party is so dominate. Good article.
>>At this number, each new member would theoretically represent about 52,000 constituents, (one-fifth of each 259,000 person district.)<<
No, they wouldn't. Each of the five district members would represent 259,000 people. They'd share the 259,000 with the four other council members and none of the five would be particularly motivated to see a group of residents as *their* constituents. Perhaps those council members would be motivated to seek the higher aims of the city as a whole or perhaps they'd be beholden to money interests or some kind of party machinery: it's hard to know.
And perhaps breaking the intimate tie between the council member and a specific geographic area and its residents would be good, as the bus route example illustrates. Maybe. Or it could be like Israel, with a single 120-member national constituency and no real time between any member of Knesset and a local group of voters, but only ties to larger and smaller (and very tiny) parties.
I don't know what the best solution is. The other evening I attended the public comment meeting on the proposed LA City Council redistricting and heard impassioned remarks by organizations and citizens mostly centered on keeping their neighborhoods and areas of common interest intact in any proposed council district. Maybe that would further undermine the city by emphasizing parochial concerns, or maybe it would enhance democracy by strengthening ties between citizens and their elected representatives. I think the tradeoffs are so great that it's hard to know exactly what the ramifications would be of swapping electoral systems out.
I enjoyed this post a lot even though I haven't even been to LA. Really nice to get a deep dive on the reasons for institutional failure.
Here's the question for me, though. We all know that America is shot through with those failures, caused by lots of structural issues that favor incumbents. What do we actually do about it? On an issue-by-issue basis like housing you can see the path to success. Your message is basically, "we've been doing a certain housing policy for ages, it hasn't worked, let's try a different one." But in this case, getting anyone besides a bunch of nerds who subscribe to political substacks to care about this sort of thing seems to border on the impossible? Especially given that the levers of power necessary to change things like this are controlled by the very incumbents we are trying to disentangle from institutions.
<I> When selecting a candidate for Congress, a voter can instantaneously know a candidate’s position on abortion, gun control or climate change just by knowing which party that candidate belongs to.</I>
That’s not true. It depends on what it takes to win. If you’re a congressional Democrat in Texas (there are 13) you modify your position as needed.
The Center for Election Science has so far had some success getting cities to adopt Approval Voting for single member districts, but their actual recommendation is Proportional Approval, either for your full legislative body or for multi-member districts. Approval has the advantage of being cheaper to implement, and its tabulation system (which was invented by Thomas Jefferson, and used for the first apportionment of the House) is much easier to follow compared to Instant Runoff's spreadsheet-level complexity.
In any case, I definitely would like to see a proportional system for more legislatures. California ought to have some Silicon Valley Libertarians in the legislature, and some Central Valley representatives in the tradition of the "Democratic Farmer Labor" alliance.
Even if you had a functional city council, you till have to deal with what Downey wants, vs LA vs Long Beach etc...
This is an issue all over the US. In Boise where I live, we are having a debate about homeless and shelters. One of the issues is that Boise is the center city, but we also almost surround another city called Garden City. Boise however can't do anything or mandate anything that involves Garden City. Garden City is at the mercy of Boise. This is just a tiny example of things that happen all over the country.
Another issue... Idaho mandates geographic districts in cities over 100K. Even if Boise wanted to change they couldn't.
And finally... proportional representation would have solved an issue we had in Boise, where almost all City Council members lived in the same upscale neighborhood (prior to our upcoming geographic representation model), since their local affluent voters voted in much greater numbers than the working class who lived in other parts of the city.
I will disagree with you about Los Angeles and biking/transport/walkability.
The secret to Los Angeles is to live and work in the same small area. Stay in your mini-bubble and life is great. My brother used to live in Seal Beach, and work at Boeing right there. He biked and walked everywhere. Rarely used his car.
They moved Boeing to up by the Airport... he had to move, but now its carpool every day.
I’m curious, why not a list system? (Either MMP or elect by lists from larger regions/districts, e.g. 15 members each from 5 regions). Certainly it’s simpler.
Proportional representation is a fantastic goal, but incredibly complex to implement. A simpler solution would be moving to approval voting for all of the single winner elections, which would help elect moderates in each of the districts, and would ultimately represent a moderate city Council for Los Angeles. Center for Election Science, and California approves is here to enable that to happen. We’re happy to work with you.
Spot on, Stan. I agree about the benefits of strong parties and multi-party democracy, and I also think cities are the unit of government where it makes the most sense to start implementing these changes. It’s more tractable to begin a bottom-up improvement in the system since local parties can reasonably abstain from a lot of the culture-war paralyzing Washington since they wouldn’t have jurisdiction over it anyway.
In Los Angeles, no matter how you slice and dice the electorate, I am afraid you are searching in vain for a large constituency that is saying "Yes, build a high rise apartment building in my neighborhood, take away a lane of traffic and I will obediently trade my car for a bicycle and a bus pass."
Are there any examples of countries that have completely different parties at any subnational level? Canada has this to an extent – there have been province-specific parties like the Parti Quebecois and Wildrose, and the provincial parties are known to be separate from their federal counterparts – but I'm not sure I've ever seen a city governed by parties that are city-specific.
I suppose proportional representation makes this easier – the Left is a much more important party in the Berlin parliament than in the Bundestag. But will local parties just naturally end up tied to the identities of the prominent federal ones, of which there are just two in the US?
Also, I know it comes from a David Foster Wallace essay, but the Latin drives me nuts, should be ex uno plures (or arguably plura).
> proportional representation elections for multi-member districts encourage the formation of multiple parties.
I feel like this argument rests on this 'encourages' being understood as 'will', which I don't really find convincing. This is America, it's a deeply two party place, and has been for hundreds of years. What if we just got more anonymous Democrats, more disenfranchised Republican bomb throwers, and nothing changed?
You can already organize branded sub parties today, and I think there are important reasons why that doesn't work and people don't do it.
I very much agree on the problem of one-party government, which happens all over the place, but, for LA then, how do these proposed reforms get implemented? Is the idea to do a proposition that is voted on by LA voters? Or would it be a statewide thing for all city councils in California? I'm not sure how you persuade turkeys to vote for Christmas if the current city council have to approve such measures.
I love Los Angeles, am a proud Democrat, and frustrated with the way my city is run.
What’s the first step to getting something like multi-member districts enacted?
I agree with the recommendations here on principle, but I’m not sure how they’ll solve the fundamental problem, especially in LA, which I think is the absence of local news media. San Francisco has notably higher turnout and also more sharply drawn political coalitions - for better or worse, candidates who are better on housing have also tended to be more deferential to SFPD (the “moderates”) and candidates who are more suspicious of the police are also more suspicious of development (the “progressives”). When I lived in LA, school board elections seemed polarized between pro-union and pro-charter forces, and an incumbent, Steve Zimmer, even lost his seat, which seems like a sign some information on policy differences was making it to voters. But on city council stuff, there’s no reliable information at all - I think more and better local media is a necessary component of the solution.
Also, I have gone to Glendale from West Hollywood by bus, and oh my god, by the time I got back I had outwitted a cyclops and heard the song of the sirens.
I came from a very red place and moved to a very blue place (though I live in a purple district). It’s amazing to see the similar types of stagnation that can occur when one party is so dominate. Good article.
>>At this number, each new member would theoretically represent about 52,000 constituents, (one-fifth of each 259,000 person district.)<<
No, they wouldn't. Each of the five district members would represent 259,000 people. They'd share the 259,000 with the four other council members and none of the five would be particularly motivated to see a group of residents as *their* constituents. Perhaps those council members would be motivated to seek the higher aims of the city as a whole or perhaps they'd be beholden to money interests or some kind of party machinery: it's hard to know.
And perhaps breaking the intimate tie between the council member and a specific geographic area and its residents would be good, as the bus route example illustrates. Maybe. Or it could be like Israel, with a single 120-member national constituency and no real time between any member of Knesset and a local group of voters, but only ties to larger and smaller (and very tiny) parties.
I don't know what the best solution is. The other evening I attended the public comment meeting on the proposed LA City Council redistricting and heard impassioned remarks by organizations and citizens mostly centered on keeping their neighborhoods and areas of common interest intact in any proposed council district. Maybe that would further undermine the city by emphasizing parochial concerns, or maybe it would enhance democracy by strengthening ties between citizens and their elected representatives. I think the tradeoffs are so great that it's hard to know exactly what the ramifications would be of swapping electoral systems out.
I enjoyed this post a lot even though I haven't even been to LA. Really nice to get a deep dive on the reasons for institutional failure.
Here's the question for me, though. We all know that America is shot through with those failures, caused by lots of structural issues that favor incumbents. What do we actually do about it? On an issue-by-issue basis like housing you can see the path to success. Your message is basically, "we've been doing a certain housing policy for ages, it hasn't worked, let's try a different one." But in this case, getting anyone besides a bunch of nerds who subscribe to political substacks to care about this sort of thing seems to border on the impossible? Especially given that the levers of power necessary to change things like this are controlled by the very incumbents we are trying to disentangle from institutions.
<I> When selecting a candidate for Congress, a voter can instantaneously know a candidate’s position on abortion, gun control or climate change just by knowing which party that candidate belongs to.</I>
That’s not true. It depends on what it takes to win. If you’re a congressional Democrat in Texas (there are 13) you modify your position as needed.
The Center for Election Science has so far had some success getting cities to adopt Approval Voting for single member districts, but their actual recommendation is Proportional Approval, either for your full legislative body or for multi-member districts. Approval has the advantage of being cheaper to implement, and its tabulation system (which was invented by Thomas Jefferson, and used for the first apportionment of the House) is much easier to follow compared to Instant Runoff's spreadsheet-level complexity.
In any case, I definitely would like to see a proportional system for more legislatures. California ought to have some Silicon Valley Libertarians in the legislature, and some Central Valley representatives in the tradition of the "Democratic Farmer Labor" alliance.
I'm surprised you didn't mention county vs city.
Even if you had a functional city council, you till have to deal with what Downey wants, vs LA vs Long Beach etc...
This is an issue all over the US. In Boise where I live, we are having a debate about homeless and shelters. One of the issues is that Boise is the center city, but we also almost surround another city called Garden City. Boise however can't do anything or mandate anything that involves Garden City. Garden City is at the mercy of Boise. This is just a tiny example of things that happen all over the country.
Another issue... Idaho mandates geographic districts in cities over 100K. Even if Boise wanted to change they couldn't.
And finally... proportional representation would have solved an issue we had in Boise, where almost all City Council members lived in the same upscale neighborhood (prior to our upcoming geographic representation model), since their local affluent voters voted in much greater numbers than the working class who lived in other parts of the city.
I will disagree with you about Los Angeles and biking/transport/walkability.
The secret to Los Angeles is to live and work in the same small area. Stay in your mini-bubble and life is great. My brother used to live in Seal Beach, and work at Boeing right there. He biked and walked everywhere. Rarely used his car.
They moved Boeing to up by the Airport... he had to move, but now its carpool every day.
I’m curious, why not a list system? (Either MMP or elect by lists from larger regions/districts, e.g. 15 members each from 5 regions). Certainly it’s simpler.
Proportional representation is a fantastic goal, but incredibly complex to implement. A simpler solution would be moving to approval voting for all of the single winner elections, which would help elect moderates in each of the districts, and would ultimately represent a moderate city Council for Los Angeles. Center for Election Science, and California approves is here to enable that to happen. We’re happy to work with you.
Spot on, Stan. I agree about the benefits of strong parties and multi-party democracy, and I also think cities are the unit of government where it makes the most sense to start implementing these changes. It’s more tractable to begin a bottom-up improvement in the system since local parties can reasonably abstain from a lot of the culture-war paralyzing Washington since they wouldn’t have jurisdiction over it anyway.
In Los Angeles, no matter how you slice and dice the electorate, I am afraid you are searching in vain for a large constituency that is saying "Yes, build a high rise apartment building in my neighborhood, take away a lane of traffic and I will obediently trade my car for a bicycle and a bus pass."
Are there any examples of countries that have completely different parties at any subnational level? Canada has this to an extent – there have been province-specific parties like the Parti Quebecois and Wildrose, and the provincial parties are known to be separate from their federal counterparts – but I'm not sure I've ever seen a city governed by parties that are city-specific.
I suppose proportional representation makes this easier – the Left is a much more important party in the Berlin parliament than in the Bundestag. But will local parties just naturally end up tied to the identities of the prominent federal ones, of which there are just two in the US?
Also, I know it comes from a David Foster Wallace essay, but the Latin drives me nuts, should be ex uno plures (or arguably plura).
> proportional representation elections for multi-member districts encourage the formation of multiple parties.
I feel like this argument rests on this 'encourages' being understood as 'will', which I don't really find convincing. This is America, it's a deeply two party place, and has been for hundreds of years. What if we just got more anonymous Democrats, more disenfranchised Republican bomb throwers, and nothing changed?
You can already organize branded sub parties today, and I think there are important reasons why that doesn't work and people don't do it.
I agree that this would be an improvement over the status quo, but wouldn't STAR voting be simpler and also address these concerns?