More Parties or No Parties by Jack Santucci

Author:Jack Santucci [Santucci, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780197630679
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

6.3 At-large election, local representation

The STV charter combined two logics: of citywide and neighborhood representation. This may explain the spending patterns noted above, and it is consistent with campaign incentives in STV.

Municipal forms of government differ: in terms of spending priorities and how they relate to voters. There are different ways to talk about this: “comprehensive” versus “symbolic” policy output (Carr 2015: 677-78), “expansive growth policies” under “reform monopolies” (Trounstine 2008: 141), “citywide focus” versus “neighborhood concerns” (D. Johnson 2014), and “programmatic” versus “particularistic benefits.” With respect to voters, council-manager governments reflect more “budgetary solvency” due to their relative political insulation (Jimenez 2020). Similarly, under council-manager government, voter turnout has tended to be lower due to the combination of non-partisan elections, geographically large districts, and possibly more frequent use of off-cycle elections (Hajnal 2009; Carr 2015).

Types of “at-large” elections also differ. If a voter has as many votes as there are seats to fill (i.e., under standard MNTV), the party can instruct voters to vote the whole slate. That logic also holds for two-round elections in multi-seat districts.12

But parties in STV elections face two problems, as the vote is single and transferable. First, the party must maximize its collective vote share by ensuring that transfers stay within the party.13 Second, the party must ensure sufficient first-choice votes for each candidate, in order to prevent early-round elimination. Optimizing these problems is known as “vote management”—guessing how many seats the party is likely to win, nominating that many candidates, and dividing the district among them for campaign purposes (known as creating “bailiwicks”).14 Hence a common feature of STV elections: geographically targeted campaigns.15

The record on STV in U.S. cities reflects a bit of both dynamics: tension between citywide and neighborhood policy, as well as bailiwick campaigning. For example, Worcester was famous in the planning literature for reliance on “spot” zoning, long after other cities had adopted comprehensive zoning ordinances (Natoli 1971). In Cambridge (MA), it was common to equate STV with “neighborhood representation” (The Editors 1961). Someone from Cincinnati repeated the same phrase when I asked about his father’s time in council there: “proportional representation is neighborhood representation.”16 This city also achieved public-sector desegregation before comparable Midwest cities (cf. Sugrue 2014: xliv, 13), possibly due to the work of Theodore “Ted” Berry, 1949–57 (Gray 1959: II-II). As chair of council’s Housing Committee, Berry also worked to delay slum clearance until relocation housing could be built (V-5). Later, he and others in the Charter Party would implement an unpopular income tax, designed, in part, to finance the city university without increasing taxes on homeowners. Finally, on New York City (without manager government), Shaw (1954: 213) writes: “Councilmen just didn’t seem able to resist their constituents’ requests on place names—more than half the local laws of 1938 related to the naming of streets, parks, or squares. Financial powers were still regarded as a convenient weapon for belaboring a Fusion administration, rather than an opportunity for framing municipal policies.”

Evidence of bailiwicks exists for at least a few cities, even though the norm was to present a full slate.

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