Posted by David Schleicher, guest-blogging:
Why Is There No Partisan Competition in City Council Elections? An Election Law
Model
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_12_07-2008_12_13.shtml#1228927670
[1]In my paper, 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. I develop a
model to explain the story.
(For those of you interested in the provenance of the thinking, the
model is derived from two-stage entry models used to study tying in
antitrust, and the general approach follows the �Politics as Markets�
approach to studying election law rooted in the work of [2]Rick Pildes
and [3]Sam Issacharoff).
Here�s the basic concept: Assume that there are both national and
local elections in a city and that both elections use first-past the
post/single member district systems (this is true almost all American
cities at this point). Next, assume my last post was right. People
have at least different preferences about local issues than they do
about national issues. That is, members of national parties do not
form strongly coherent blocks at the local level � they could not
agree on a common local platform. Party can explain a little about
local preferences, but not much more than that.
Given these basic assumptions, the ordinary assumptions of a Downsian
model would suggest that two separate party systems would develop �
Republicans and Democrats would contest national elections and either
two different parties would contest local ones or the Democrats and
Republicans would change their positions on local issues to become
competitive at the local level. The question is why this doesn�t
happen.
To explain, I need to make some assumptions about voters and to
incorporate a series of common state, federal and constitutional laws.
The two assumptions are that voters care more about national issues
than local issues when making party identification decisions. and that
individual city council races are low-salience � voters have little to
no independent knowledge about city council candidates. There is
substantial evidence backing up both of these assumptions (look in the
[4]paper if you�re interested ).
The laws are what I call the unitary party rules:
1. National Parties automatically receive ballot places in local
elections, usually on the basis of how well they do in gubernatorial
races.
2. States and political parties make it difficult to change parties
between elections � there are laws limiting the ability of voters to
switch parties and still vote in primaries (for a period of time), and
strong limits on the ability of candidates and activists to switch
parties between elections.
3. As a matter of Constitutional law, national political parties have
the right to participate and use their organizational and financial
muscle in local elections (even if the elections are non-partisan).
4. Primary elections are used to select candidates.
Under these laws and the assumptions above, you can see why there is
no partisan competition in local elections.
In the first instance, the 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. But using primary elections
makes this impossible. Local party members don�t have consistent
preferences and the result is candidates that are all over the map on
local issues. Further, they will have trouble attracting candidates
and activists from the majority, as those candidates and activists (as
well as the representative local voters who they�d have to attract to
have primaries among a local issue preference-consistent group) would
not choose to join the local minority party in local elections because
they care more about national elections and don�t want to be
penalized.
This is an inefficient outcome � local elections end up not having
competition and hence don�t end up with representative results. The
question then is why is there not entry?
The assumptions and laws show that there are substantial barriers to
entry. A local only third party cannot attract adherents, because
people care more national issues than local ones and won�t abandon
their national party to contest local elections. Further, they face
the ordinary limits on third parties � [5]Duverger�s Law and the
organizational muscle of the national parties. Under the model, the
only way a local-only third party could get adherents is by competing
in national elections as well as local elections, but national
elections aren�t uncompetitive. So there is no entry and no
competition
The model is a bit dry, but perhaps it can be explained through a
story. This is from my paper��
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.
Thus, in a district which a Republican mayor won 80 percent of the
vote, the Republican city council candidate devoted to exactly the
same platform as the Mayor only won 35 percent, despite being
endorsed by the mayor and the major newspaper and facing a
political neophyte. The only factor that mattered was the 2-1
advantage Democrats had in registration.
The story of Joel Zinberg is the story of all city council
candidates: what they say and who they are matter very little to
those who will vote for them. It is their party status and the
popularity of that party at the national level that defines them.
References
1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1122422
2. http://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/profile.cfm?personID=20200
3. http://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/profile.cfm?personID=23845
4. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1122422
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
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