The case for parliamentary cities

Plus a lot of NYC mayoral takes and thoughts on Iran

I don’t want to be Mr. Wet Blanket Scold, yelling at Democrats to stop talking about immigration.

But I do wish all these members of Congress making a show of demanding entry to ICE detention facilities and hoping to provoke conflict and news on this question could take a minute to think. Picking fights with Trump is smart. Making news is smart. Being confrontational in selective ways is smart. But if it’s possible to be smart and creative about picking fights and making news, shouldn’t it be possible to be smart and creative about picking fights and making news on Democrats’ best issue (Medicaid cuts)? Can’t you make news at a hospital facing closure if these cuts go through? Visit a clinic providing care to the poor? I liked this effort.

It’s not, again, that the ICE visits are bad. But they offer a reminder that it’s possible to put effort into your political messaging and try to get attention for things, and yet the attention-getting instinct seems largely absent around this reconciliation bill. Where are the protests? Where are the stunts? This bill is deeply unpopular, and yet massively undercovered despite being objectively important.

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Rob P: You posted this week that cities should implement parliamentary systems with proportional representation as a better alternative to either ranked-choice voting or first-past-the-post voting. This has long seemed to me to be an experiment worth trying in American politics. Have any municipalities actually attempted it?

To the best of my knowledge, every large city in America operates under a kind of mini-Madisonian system in which a separately elected mayor “checks” a city council.

But it’s common for smaller cities to have a council-manager system, where there either is no mayor or else “mayor” is a symbolic job given to basically the president of the council. The council hires a city manager to serve as chief executive officer for the city and to run the executive agencies. This system I do not love because the normal pattern in city government is that you have a mayor who is interested in citywide topics like whether the schools are good, the economy is growing, and crime is going down, and then that mayor is hamstrung by a council with more parochial interests.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, they have council-manager government, but the council is nine at-large seats elected via single-transferrable vote. This is in effect a proportional representation parliamentary system, except that it lacks actual political parties. But in lieu of parties, advocacy organizations can recommend an entire slate, as the YIMBY group A Better Cambridge did in 2023.

Six out of their nine endorsed candidates won, and as Kriston Capps reported for Bloomberg, Cambridge ended up passing what’s probably the single most ambitious municipal zoning reform in America.

The movement has also cultivated its own champions: Azeem, now a second-term council member, previously served on the board of ABC and founded Affordable Housing MA (the statewide organization that Kanson-Benanav has led since 2021). In the 2023 local election, A Better Cambridge endorsed nine candidates; six of them now hold council seats, among them Azeem and Sumbul Siddiqui, who co-chair the housing committee.

“It’s the success of the slate as a whole that allows us to demonstrate the electorate’s support for housing reform and affordability,” says Justin Saif, co-chair of ABC since 2023.

What’s good about this specifically for the housing issue is that it focuses council elections on citywide questions rather than neighborhood-level ones.

But beyond the specifics of the housing issue, the primary playing out in New York underscores the value of a proportional system. The city just has (and has long had) a sizable leftist bloc, a kind of outer boroughs crank bloc, a bunch of liberal reformers, and two different flavors of moderates — rich white guys and older African-Americans. Michael Bloomberg had the rich white guys, the cranks, and the liberal reformers. Bill de Blasio had the reformers, the leftists, and the Black moderates. Eric Adams put together both kinds of moderates plus the cranks. Right now, the question seems to be whether the liberal reformers will reluctantly go for Cuomo (as the New York Times advised them to) or reluctantly go for Mamdani (as Abundance NYC recommends). It would be much better if Cuomo and Mamdani had a lot of support in parliament and then had to explicitly bargain with the people who don’t like either of them.

This, to be clear, is just part of my general case for parliamentarism and has nothing in particular to do with city government.

The point I was making with the tweet, though, is that fundamental constitutional change is so unlikely to happen that it’s barely worth talking about. City charters change pretty frequently, and there’s a lot more variation in how local governments are organized than you see with states, which basically all copy Madisonian structures and even have bicameralism for no reason.

Milan Singh: What can Democrats learn from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor?