David Schleicher continues to turn his powerful intellect to the under-studied subject of urban political economy. Lack of information is always a problem in democracy, but…
…voters in national elections are provided with a coping
mechanism, a bit of publicly provided information, given to them
directly at the moment of voting, the party label on the ballot. As Morris Fiorina argued,
voters develop “running tallies” about the parties, using retrospectice
evaluations of how life has been under one party or another. That is,
they gather over time about the qualities, successes and failures of
each of the political parties to develop a scoresheet or tally that
will provide them with guidance about how to vote in the future…[…]
Voters in local elections — at least those that use partisan
elections — are given information too, but it is of a lower quality. If
I am right, the party heuristic provides only very weak information at
the local level. As a result, big city voters are left largely adrift
without the tools to provide much meaningful input in local elections.
Voters use party labels almost exclusively, even though they carry
little information, because they don’t have any other information.
Given rational ignorance, this means that big city elections do not
regularly generate representative outcomes.
But why don’t voters just do retrospective voting? If outcomes are better than normal, re-elect the incumbents. If they’re worse than normal, elect their opponents. You don’t need to make a big effort to gather this information. Just stroll around your city, and ask yourself “Do I like what I see?”
I don’t see any reason why this wouldn’t work if tried. The problem, I suspect, is that urban voters won’t try it. New Yorkers are Democrats, and even the terrors of the 70s and the revival of the 90s weren’t enough to change that.
READER COMMENTS
sourcreamus
Dec 11 2008 at 3:02pm
Retrospective voting would mean that voters would have to admit to being mistaken in the last election. It would also carry the stigma of having to be disloyal to one’s party. Being politically ignorant and disloyal would be too big a blow to most people’s self image.
John Thacker
Dec 11 2008 at 3:15pm
Arguably people are willing to change that for a few big, high-profile races like mayor, but aren’t willing to take the time to actually learn about down-ticket races, or trust someone who claims to be a “Bloomberg Republican” or whatever.
El Presidnte
Dec 11 2008 at 4:06pm
Urban politics should have strong correlations with urban economics. Population density, agglomerations, lifestyles, and modes of production that accompany urban settings might influence voters to think of themselves as needing and wanting different policies to suit their environment. Their party bias is likely shorthand for their policy bias. Whether or not their preferred party implements their preferred policies, and whether the policies bring about preferred outcomes, is something else. I’m not sure to what extent voters can operationally identify these three distinct concepts (Party, Policy, Outcome) and conceptualize the interaction between them when they vote.
bp
Dec 11 2008 at 10:05pm
Is the answer the median urbanite?
Steve Sailer
Dec 11 2008 at 10:11pm
Is this such a complicated question?
Big cities in America tend to be dominated by Democratic politicians because the kind of people who live in big cities — minorities, gays, and white people without children — tend to be Democrats
Kurbla
Dec 12 2008 at 12:28am
Democrats are leftists, Republicans are rightists, and for majority of people, that’s it. Few people close to the center change their votes on the base of the qualities of the candidates, past results etc. but not many.
Max M
Dec 12 2008 at 2:39am
Not sure if retrospective voting would work. If you have a fiscally conservative politician in office – its likely his impetus to lower spending and taxes would not have substantial positive effects in the short run (before the next election cycle). The big-spender would, on the other hand, tax the long-run in order to achieve some short-run local economic boost.
If that is the case, fiscal conservative politicians are doomed not by demographics, but by fairly short election cycles and even the nearsightedness of voters.
Richard
Dec 12 2008 at 10:46am
Bryan’s question assumes that voters in local elections even know which candidate is the incumbent. Except for maybe the mayor’s race, that assumption probably is unrealistic.
Bo
Dec 12 2008 at 10:50am
Following the points above, the population of a city isn’t exactly the same over time. New York City has a reputation for being leftist: those who moved there as leftists in their 20s may consider moving away when they become more right-wing in their 40s. They’ll just be replaced by other leftist 20-somethings, however.
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