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 think that if the city council featured candidates representing several parties (maybe a housing party, a defund the police party, a pro business party, a Green Party, whatever they turn out to be) the little slivers of local news would be sufficient for people to learn the parties and vote effectively.
I agree Eli with your observation that elimination of truly local.media has really hurt democracy. I live in asmall city of 26,000 and I can tell you it makes a difference. How can a citizen keep up? How do they stop officials from burying important discussions that don't necessarily require a vote NOW, but need to happen? Often it's journalists who keep raising issues, kind of being the memory for the citizens.
The local media issue is getting a bit better here. Laist and the Westside Current offer a decent amount of coverage. Santa Monica has the Mirror and the Daily Press, there is the Argonaut. It's improving.
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.
The thing about proportional representation is that it _lets_ you win a seat based on appealing geographically -- if you have deep enough support from one geography to put together the requisite votes, you get a seat.
But it doesn't _make_ you win a seat that way. There are other paths to victory, other ways to piece together a winning coalition. It allows people to foreground other identities, rather than ONLY thinking about geography.
Each of the five district members would need at most 52,000 votes/supporters to be elected. You can modify the demographics of those 52,000 and pick up other types of supporters in your district, but in the end, you are representing the interests of those who voted for you and will vote for you. Why would the YIMBY slate representative in district X need to represent the 3/5 of the district that is NIMBY?
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.
Are there any obstacles to making LA or Boise their own counties? Colorado has two "city and county" political subdivisions (Denver and Broomfield) and may get at least one more at some point (there are occasional ballot measures to make Aurora a "city and county," but those have failed in the past).
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.
Agreed. Maybe part of the council could be made up of single-member districts, and part could be 'at large' from a list. Seems like it would resolve the parochial issues while still having members who could take a larger view of the city's issues
Yeah I do think American cities could be a good place to try MMP. But we do have to be careful that it is MMP (where the party list vote determines the overall composition of the legislature, even if you sometimes have to add seats to the legislature to preserve that principle) and not a parallel voting system (where the party list vote only determines the composition of a fixed block of seats, without reference to the outcome of the elections for single-member districts). The latter isn’t really PR and also invites gerrymandering (it’s how Orbán keeps control of Hungary).
Also, random thought: If you then also made the Mayor elected by the council, you could run the election as though it were 2 separate ones (column A: Which person do you want to be your councilor, column B: which person do you want to be Mayor).
I think there are two basic problems with MMP in this situation.
First, how do you do primaries for a list? And I can't see Americans comfortably accepting party-chosen lists.
Second, if the Democratic Party enters a list, then that will just dominate the election.
The big benefit of STV is that it works with informal parties just as well as with formal ones, so the factions of the Democratic Party can run against each other, even if every candidate formally has "Democrat" on the ballot paper.
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.
Various flavors of proportional representation are how almost every democracy in the world does elections. The American-centric nerd war among single winner election reforms (IRV, approval, STAR, etc) is peculiar to the US's strong aversion to the idea of political parties.
I think that if we used an electoral system that could elect minority parties (which is the whole point of PR), Americans would discover that there are parties that match their political interests. It was choosing between only two parties that they hated.
I don’t think moderation is the issue in Los Angeles city council - rather, it’s that candidates don’t stand for issues at all, but instead just have a bunch of personal relationships.
I sure hope approval voting helps! I find it interesting, and would particularly like to use it for party primaries. However, decades of evidence from real-world implementation of AV shows that the vast majority of users just bullet vote- they only vote for one person. Bullet voting rates of 80% have been found consistently, which is why organizations as diverse as the IEEE and Dartmouth College have tried and eventually rejected AV.
Also, AV doesn't do much when there are too many candidates- with 6-8+ candidates per election, the winner typically has a small plurality. This is specifically why Dartmouth College ceased using AV
Also, if you did want to implement proportional representation, proportional approval voting is a much simpler way to do it, rather than fiendishly complex single transferable vote.
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."
I've been that constituency in LA, and here's why: A high rise apartment would have made it cheaper to rent near my workplace; I didn't own a car; Living near my workplace it would have been convenient to bike (until my bike got stolen but that's a whole nother LA problem).
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).
What I would naturally expect in California cities is something like a two and a half party system, with a pro growth and development party aligned with national democrats, a pro preservation and protection party aligned with national democrats, and a fractional Republican Party that only matters in one or two carefully drawn districts.
Vancouver has its own municipal parties, as does Montreal; in both cases, while they're distinct and independent from the other orders of governments' parties, there are clear alignments between them.
Vancouver politics has been fragmented by the implosion of the previously dominant party, Vision Vancouver. In its wake there were at least six different parties: NPA, Green, OneCity, COPE, YES Vancouver, Pro Vancouver. The NPA got five seats (out of 10), Green three, OneCity and COPE one each. The mayor is independent. On top of that, the NPA has *also* imploded, with four of the five councilors leaving the party and one setting up her own party (TEAM).
Finally, the #1 issue in Vancouver is housing, and the divide isn't based on party lines, so party labels provide no information to pro-housing or anti-development voters. There's four consistent Yes votes on housing, three consistent No votes, and four swing votes, but the public doesn't know who they are. See the end of this post: https://russilwvong.com/blog/apartments/
I'm not sure if Vancouver is evidence for or against Stan's argument. Councilors are elected by Vancouver voters at large. In theory this means that they would consider the interests of everyone. In practice, it seems that a councilor can be elected or re-elected so long as they hold onto their base of support. So we have the same issue of anti-development voters playing an outsized role (even though they're only about 30% of the population).
The Tanzanian mainland is mostly a contest between the ruling CCM (Party of the Revolution) and Chadema (Party of Democracy and Development), but the islands of Zanzibar have the (CUF) Civic United Front.
In that case, Tanganyika (the mainland) and Zanzibar were separate territories and were unified in 1964 (a forgotten episode of the Cold War), with Zanzibar retaining some autonomy (including its own legislature), so CUF and CCM compete on Zanzibar, but Chadema has no presence there.
> 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.
Exactly.
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 think that if the city council featured candidates representing several parties (maybe a housing party, a defund the police party, a pro business party, a Green Party, whatever they turn out to be) the little slivers of local news would be sufficient for people to learn the parties and vote effectively.
I agree Eli with your observation that elimination of truly local.media has really hurt democracy. I live in asmall city of 26,000 and I can tell you it makes a difference. How can a citizen keep up? How do they stop officials from burying important discussions that don't necessarily require a vote NOW, but need to happen? Often it's journalists who keep raising issues, kind of being the memory for the citizens.
The local media issue is getting a bit better here. Laist and the Westside Current offer a decent amount of coverage. Santa Monica has the Mirror and the Daily Press, there is the Argonaut. It's improving.
The LA Times has gotten better too. The situation here isn't perfect, but a far sight better than most places in America.
(Also, I got more mailings for school board elections than every other one combined.)
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.
The thing about proportional representation is that it _lets_ you win a seat based on appealing geographically -- if you have deep enough support from one geography to put together the requisite votes, you get a seat.
But it doesn't _make_ you win a seat that way. There are other paths to victory, other ways to piece together a winning coalition. It allows people to foreground other identities, rather than ONLY thinking about geography.
Each of the five district members would need at most 52,000 votes/supporters to be elected. You can modify the demographics of those 52,000 and pick up other types of supporters in your district, but in the end, you are representing the interests of those who voted for you and will vote for you. Why would the YIMBY slate representative in district X need to represent the 3/5 of the district that is NIMBY?
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.
Are there any obstacles to making LA or Boise their own counties? Colorado has two "city and county" political subdivisions (Denver and Broomfield) and may get at least one more at some point (there are occasional ballot measures to make Aurora a "city and county," but those have failed in the past).
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.
Agreed. Maybe part of the council could be made up of single-member districts, and part could be 'at large' from a list. Seems like it would resolve the parochial issues while still having members who could take a larger view of the city's issues
Yeah I do think American cities could be a good place to try MMP. But we do have to be careful that it is MMP (where the party list vote determines the overall composition of the legislature, even if you sometimes have to add seats to the legislature to preserve that principle) and not a parallel voting system (where the party list vote only determines the composition of a fixed block of seats, without reference to the outcome of the elections for single-member districts). The latter isn’t really PR and also invites gerrymandering (it’s how Orbán keeps control of Hungary).
Also, random thought: If you then also made the Mayor elected by the council, you could run the election as though it were 2 separate ones (column A: Which person do you want to be your councilor, column B: which person do you want to be Mayor).
I think there are two basic problems with MMP in this situation.
First, how do you do primaries for a list? And I can't see Americans comfortably accepting party-chosen lists.
Second, if the Democratic Party enters a list, then that will just dominate the election.
The big benefit of STV is that it works with informal parties just as well as with formal ones, so the factions of the Democratic Party can run against each other, even if every candidate formally has "Democrat" on the ballot paper.
List-type systems tend to require formal parties.
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.
Various flavors of proportional representation are how almost every democracy in the world does elections. The American-centric nerd war among single winner election reforms (IRV, approval, STAR, etc) is peculiar to the US's strong aversion to the idea of political parties.
I think that if we used an electoral system that could elect minority parties (which is the whole point of PR), Americans would discover that there are parties that match their political interests. It was choosing between only two parties that they hated.
I don’t think moderation is the issue in Los Angeles city council - rather, it’s that candidates don’t stand for issues at all, but instead just have a bunch of personal relationships.
I sure hope approval voting helps! I find it interesting, and would particularly like to use it for party primaries. However, decades of evidence from real-world implementation of AV shows that the vast majority of users just bullet vote- they only vote for one person. Bullet voting rates of 80% have been found consistently, which is why organizations as diverse as the IEEE and Dartmouth College have tried and eventually rejected AV.
Also, AV doesn't do much when there are too many candidates- with 6-8+ candidates per election, the winner typically has a small plurality. This is specifically why Dartmouth College ceased using AV
We’re already working to bring approval voting to Culver City!
Also, if you did want to implement proportional representation, proportional approval voting is a much simpler way to do it, rather than fiendishly complex single transferable vote.
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."
I've been that constituency in LA, and here's why: A high rise apartment would have made it cheaper to rent near my workplace; I didn't own a car; Living near my workplace it would have been convenient to bike (until my bike got stolen but that's a whole nother LA problem).
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).
Montreal has completely different parties from both Quebec and Canada. I think Paris might also have some unique local parties.
What I would naturally expect in California cities is something like a two and a half party system, with a pro growth and development party aligned with national democrats, a pro preservation and protection party aligned with national democrats, and a fractional Republican Party that only matters in one or two carefully drawn districts.
Vancouver has its own municipal parties, as does Montreal; in both cases, while they're distinct and independent from the other orders of governments' parties, there are clear alignments between them.
"there are clear alignments between them."
I would dispute this.
Vancouver politics has been fragmented by the implosion of the previously dominant party, Vision Vancouver. In its wake there were at least six different parties: NPA, Green, OneCity, COPE, YES Vancouver, Pro Vancouver. The NPA got five seats (out of 10), Green three, OneCity and COPE one each. The mayor is independent. On top of that, the NPA has *also* imploded, with four of the five councilors leaving the party and one setting up her own party (TEAM).
Finally, the #1 issue in Vancouver is housing, and the divide isn't based on party lines, so party labels provide no information to pro-housing or anti-development voters. There's four consistent Yes votes on housing, three consistent No votes, and four swing votes, but the public doesn't know who they are. See the end of this post: https://russilwvong.com/blog/apartments/
I'm not sure if Vancouver is evidence for or against Stan's argument. Councilors are elected by Vancouver voters at large. In theory this means that they would consider the interests of everyone. In practice, it seems that a councilor can be elected or re-elected so long as they hold onto their base of support. So we have the same issue of anti-development voters playing an outsized role (even though they're only about 30% of the population).
I suspect that the most obvious example is India?
London had a separate party system until the 1940s - Progressives and Municipal Reform.
The Tanzanian mainland is mostly a contest between the ruling CCM (Party of the Revolution) and Chadema (Party of Democracy and Development), but the islands of Zanzibar have the (CUF) Civic United Front.
In that case, Tanganyika (the mainland) and Zanzibar were separate territories and were unified in 1964 (a forgotten episode of the Cold War), with Zanzibar retaining some autonomy (including its own legislature), so CUF and CCM compete on Zanzibar, but Chadema has no presence there.
Also, someone should update this article which says that the next election will be in October 2015 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Tanzania
> 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?