Why are large cities one-party states?

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Bryan Caplan raises the question.

From the standpoint of the textbook Median Voter Model, this is awfully puzzling. Even if urbanites are extremely left-wing, you would expect urban Republicans to move sharply left to accommodate them. Once they do so, the standard prediction is that Republicans will win half the time. But plainly they don’t.

I think I understand how the Democrats dominate big city elections. The Democrats have the public sector unions on their side, and the public sector unions are the only organized force in local elections. Also, local elections often are held at odd times, not coinciding with national elections, which reduces turnout and favors the organized over the general voting public.

In smaller communities, other, more idiosyncratic sets of interests might influence mayoral outcomes. Or a really popular individual could win against a public-sector bloc is smaller and less tightly organized than those in the big cities.

But if public sector workers aligned with one party are the key to controlling big-city politics, why is national politics competitive? At the Federal level, Democrats dominate within the public-sector work force.

Perhaps we actually do live in a single-party state, in spite of the fact that Republicans sometimes win the Presidency. Suppose that the people who staff the Federal government do not need to always control the Presidency in order to wield power. When a Republican is elected, he becomes a Potemkin President.

19 thoughts on “Why are large cities one-party states?”

  1. The Median Voter Model would be alive and well if it was updated to “The Median Gerrymandered Primary Voter Model.”

    Also, as RPLong perceptively points out in the EconLog comments, “Republican and Democrat are largely lifestyle affiliations, not really expressions of belief or policy.”

    Add all this to the fact that, the more densely people live, the more they will necessarily require collective solutions to the problems they face and there isn’t really much mystery left about this.

    • The power of public sector unions cannot be over-estimated: witness the ruin of California and Illinois. Yet, other countries with powerful local government unions have a wide range of political parties governing major cities. For example, the mayors of the 4 largest cities in the Netherlands are from three different parties including a liberal (that is center-right) party. And better yet, look at the incredibly diverse and pluralistic range of municipal governing coalitions in Brazil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Brazilian_municipal_elections

      The coalition building in Brazil is open and transparent: in the USA and Singapore it is hidden from public view and occurs within the local machines. Machine candidates dominate primaries too, but machines must be oiled in order to run and this assures various coalition representatives get tossed a bone from time to time. Vote buying is the decisive factor in all 2-party systems. A party that campaigns on reducing spending is indeed at a major disadvantage when campaigning against organized interests.

      But it is too easy to just dismiss it at that. The number of conflicting interests increases with density so vote buying may operate to reduce overall transaction costs in a Coasean sense. And let’s face it, a majority of people in urban areas want good schools, parks, libraries, and other public amenities. Libertarians are never going to convert anyone with their sacralization of free-ridership that dismisses the taxes to pay for them as “theft.”

      Republicans generally seem to favor reduced local government spending which wins them nothing. And peeling off the police unions from the Democratic coalition has done the police no favors as the judicial travesties involving police and Biden’s politicized micromanagement from DC of local police departments attest. Moreover, there is a strange inconsistency in advertising oneself as tough on crime but indifferent to disease. However vile and repulsive he is as an individual, Romney was prescient as Massachusetts governor in advancing a strong albeit half-baked health agenda. Any party that would hope to disrupt the Democratic stranglehold must address health with an authentically efficacious
      Program.

      The Republican Party is not up to that challenge and so it is dead and buried. The opportunity now is for a radical populist party to undo the wretched shackles of the decomposing US constitution. Offering the plurality of Americans who despise both parties and yearn for an authentically representative system of government that honors their individuality and autonomy is our best hope for escape from squalor. Will Andrew Yang mature and seize this opportunity? Very much looking forward to reading his new book.

      • “A party that campaigns on reducing spending is indeed at a major disadvantage when campaigning against organized interests.” Especially when said party only campaigns on reduced spending, but never ever reduces spending, even when it controls the government.

    • I’m not sure what you mean by your first sentence. The median voter model clearly does not apply to city and state politics; lots of deep red and blue states and regions are skewed way beyond the gerrymandering effect. Median voter theorem only seems to possibly apply to the national parties.

      • I mean that the median voter in a gerrymandered primary doesn’t look much like the median voter nationwide.

        But those primary voters do look a lot more like the candidates who are wining those primary races and this is driving polarization. Many incumbents in both parties are taking more extreme positions than they otherwise would because the biggest threat to them is in the primaries, not the general election.

  3. “Perhaps we actually do live in a single-party state, in spite of the fact that Republicans sometimes win the Presidency.”

    Mencius Moldbug pointed this out ten years ago.

    • This was the central theme in Michael Anton’s famous “Flight 93 Election” essay:

      If you’re among the subspecies conservative intellectual or politician, you’ve accepted—perhaps not consciously, but unmistakably—your status on the roster of the Washington Generals of American politics. Your job is to show up and lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid. To the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it’s as sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders…

      Aso, Angelo Codevilla says this eloquently,

      the Democrats [are] the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners… As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.

  4. As in economics, political theory assumes rational actors. But sapiens are irrational actors, behaving in ways that they might believe are in their best interest, but actually are not in their best interest. Simplifying issues instead of deeply examining them, sapiens have a habit of disproving textbook models.

  5. One confounder is that “big city” is fuzzy term.

    Many American municipalities are just part of continuous metropolitan areas surrounded by a ring of sometimes dozens of officially independent suburban jurisdictions, all with different sets of political leadership, some of which are – get this – even Republican.

    As an example, in “Metro Detroit”, many more people live in the periphery than in the bombed-out center, and none of those people get to vote for Detroit officials, even though they certainly have a stake in Detroit’s policies.

    And, famously, the demographics and age / lifestyle profile of the city center and periphery are different, following generations of white flight and difficult living conditions for decent people of modest means aspiring to form families. The capacity to vote with one’s feet and yet still be able to have access to the economies of agglomeration of the urban labor market and “work in the city” at the price of a commute also complicates the situation.

    This sets up selection / sorting problems, as people on the right who are most disenchanted with an inner city / urban core’s politics tend to move out, but this is asymmetric and doesn’t apply to the left.

    You can imagine this as payoffs for effort.

    Someone who wants things to be much more right-wing could put huge effort into voice to try to change local politics, with little chance of success translating into personal benefits. On the other hand with a little effort, they can move to a better place not too far away.

    Someone who wants things to be much more left-wing has nowhere to go, locally. Their only choice with regards to exit is to change jobs and move away from friends and family and go to a completely different region that is much more Blue on average, but probably not that much more Blue that the core of any large city. Little bang for a lot of bucks.

    On the other hand, boosted by the positive-feedback of chasing away the marginal political opponent, a little effort into voice can apparently make the local scene lurch far left quickly.

  6. In most local elections I have experienced, there is barely any information at all about any of the candidates. For a voter, it might as well be a random choice except if the race is big enough to attract newspaper endorsements. These will generally be party line Democrats given that 95% of reporters are left wing.

    An example criteria I have used for local elections: “is this candidate competent enough to put up a web site for their campaign?”

    • A lot of local democratic politics is just invisible and background noise to a lot of people.

      I was at a recent get-together of a bunch of people who are successful, well-educated, and generally pretty well informed about news and politics, probably in the top 5%.

      Almost none of them knew the names of *any* local officials without being prompted or reminded, and even then, knew nothing about them or their policies. Almost no one votes in or even knew about who ran in the primary elections. No one knew the numbers for the districts of state delegate or state senator where they resided (this is somewhat forgivable, since where I live, those districts are gerrymandered and convoluted and the way they drew the lines you can drive across the boundaries of four of them in a single mile in some places.)

      On the other hand, almost everyone knew which public school district they were in, who the superintendent was, and the name of someone on the school board.

      It seemed to me that most of these people were mostly voting party line, and placing a certain amount of trust that The Party and its process would make sure an acceptable and tolerably on-team candidate would be on the ballot.

      Sometimes people propose “Proportional Representation” systems in which seats get allotted to parties and The Party Decides how to fill them, but it seems to me that at least on the local level, because of what I’ve described above, what we have is already not that different for a lot of elections, a lot of the time.

  7. Notice that every single big corporation is far to the left of public opinion. So are universities. So are labor unions and teacher unions in particular. So are the military generals. So is mainstream news media. So are social media platforms. So are GONGOs like Freedom House. And so is every city local government. It’s the same general phenomenon.

    The left builds real, entrenched, and often hidden power in bureaucracies. The first function of a bureaucracy is to maintain or grow the bureaucracy (“self-licking ice cream cones”). One of the main things you do with power is make sure that rivals don’t take that power away.

    • Pagan originally meant “rural”, not a particular belief system in the old gods or whatever. Just “hick that isn’t with the times that connect big city people understand.”

      Or as Douthat put it:

      “In which case identifying a procedural roadblock to the new worldview misses the point: A John Roberts or Amy Coney Barrett ruling will no more stop a cultural revolution than a 16th century papal bull could restore the world of Innocent III, or Julian the Apostate could re-awaken the oracles by decree. Likewise the fact that most Democratic voters aren’t all-in for the new ideology is like saying, ah, don’t worry, opinion polls in 337 A.D. show that the average Roman still believes firmly in the old gods, nothing’s going to change. In fact it could, and very soon it did.”

      Douthat hopes that the fact that the Successor Ideology is a shit tier worldview means it won’t be around in 2040…but a lot of shit tier worldview have lasted a lot longer.

  8. Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 Potemkin presidents? I’m not seeing it.

    Occasionally win the presidency? Perhaps occasionally win the popular vote…

    Since 1980
    R – 6
    D – 5

    Idk but modern Senate control has shifted many times. Soon the Senate will ne blood red. 30% of the population will control 70 seats.

    House is a different story…

    • The way I see it, is that Democrats and Republicans have generally been two neoliberal parties, but with different emphases.

      When Democrats are in power, they primarily further social liberalism, and Republicans primarily further economic liberalism. There is rarely any meaningful reversal of the gains achieved once power changes. And while both parties use rhetoric against the other party’s brand of neoliberalism, in practice, they don’t meaningfully attack it. Most victories are small and symbolic.

      Trump was the candidate of Christian social conservatives, but from their perspective very little was accomplished. I’m almost certain that even with getting 3 nominees, the court will not overturn Roe (indeed, Trump pick Gorsuch wrote the opinion expanding transgender rights). Trump did, however, cut corporate taxes from 35% to 21%.

      Democrats often talk about the rich paying their fair share, but despite having been in power for 17 years since Reagan, income taxes haven’t come remotely close to the 70% they were in the Carter days. Usually they like to stop at 39.6%, with perhaps a few extra percent on top for an Obamacare tax. Democrats lambasted Trump’s corporate tax cuts, but seem content to put the rate up to 26%, rather than back to 35%. Estate tax rates remain low, as do taxes on capital gains and dividends.

  10. “Perhaps we actually do live in a single-party state, in spite of the fact that Republicans sometimes win the Presidency.”

    Bingo

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