Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Single Party Rule is Bad For Democracy with Stan Oklobdzija

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Once one party totally controls the government in a state or city, it should be easy for that party to pass all the laws it wants to, right? Well, wrong. Single party rule can actually make it harder to enact policy. On the show this week, UC Riverside’s professor Stan Oklobdzija explains why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things they know that I don't know that you might not know. My mind is going to be blown. Your mind is going to be blown. We're both going to have a great time together. At least that's the intro I've been doing on this show for a couple months now. Maybe I should change it up, come up with a different way to introduce this show, but I do enjoy saying it, and that is what we are here to do. I don't know. If you have

thoughts on a new intro, send me an email at factually at adamconover.net. That is the show's email inbox. I do read those emails, and I do occasionally even reply to them, and I love to hear from you, the listener. But let's talk about what we are doing on this show today. Today, we are going to talk about political science once again. You know, we have just two political parties in America, and they're locked in permanent combat, right? They're constantly fighting for control of political institutions and to enact their preferred policies. And a lot of people in those parties believe deep down that if they could only defeat their nemesis, if they could finally wipe out those assholes who are standing in their way, they could put in place the programs that America really needs and everything would be

great, right? Get rid of those pesky Democrats, get rid of those pesky Republicans, and we could build a utopia in America without the meddling of the other side. Well, here's the weird thing about that deep down assumption. See, one party rule actually happens all the time in this country, not nationally, but in our states and cities. States in which a single party controls both chambers of the legislature and the governorship are all over the place. There are 23 states with a Republican trifecta and 13 states with a Democratic one. In Mississippi, every statewide office is held by a Republican trifecta and 13 states with a Democratic one. In Mississippi, every

statewide office is held by a Republican. And in California, where I live, every major statewide office is occupied by a Democrat. Now, contrary to what you sometimes hear, that's not because there are no Republicans in California. In fact, there are millions of Republicans here, way more than there are in a Republican state like Wyoming, for instance. But because they are not in the majority, the Republican Party here doesn't have much power. And, you know, this is a somewhat historical anomaly. California used to go back and forth between Republican and Democratic administrations. This is the state that gave America Nixon, Reagan and Breitbart dot com. Yet now it is completely controlled by Democrats. In fact, a lot of the time when you go to the polls in California, even though it's a general election, you'll be looking at two ballot lines and choosing between two Democrats because no Republican at all is running for the seat.

It is pretty wild. So you would think that with that total of a Democratic victory in this state, that Democrats would be able to enact their will, right? Put all those progressive programs that they want to put in place nationally in place locally, paid family leave, affordable housing, you know, reforming policing, all those big ticket objectives. Well, they should be able to get them done here in California, right? Well, that doesn't actually seem to be happening at all. See, what if I told you that contrary to what a lot of partisans believe, that single party rule can actually be a bad thing

for enacting that party stated goals. That when you control all of government, it actually makes it harder to get the shit you wanna do done. It sounds like a paradox, but it appears to be true, especially in America's cities. In fact, one party rule can literally end up unmooring democracy. But why? Why does this happen? And what can we do about it? Well, to discuss our guest today is Stan Aklabjia.

He's a visiting professor at UC Riverside School of Public Policy, and he recently wrote a fantastic essay about this topic called America Cities Need Multiparty Democracy. This was a fascinating conversation. I know you're going to love it. Please welcome Stan Aklabjia. Stan, thank you so much for being here. Hey, cool. Thanks for having me. You wrote a fantastic piece in the newsletter Slow Boring a while back about why it is so hard for cities like Los Angeles, where I live, where you live, but also cities across the country to enact the kind of policies that their citizens actually want. You've got citizens saying we want to end housing segregation. We want just to take one example. And then the people in charge end up putting in

policies that that either perpetuate or further those problems. Why is that? What is the systemic problem in our cities? Well, I mean, there's really no one singular answer to this. But I mean, in cities, we have a sort of different electoral system that's evolved over the decades, right? Since a lot of the reforms around the turn of the century leading up until now. And so we've kind of gone on this path dependency of really sort of using antiquated institutions that don't really reflect the modern realities on the ground, right? So when people end up in the voting booth, the way they vote and the way politicians sort of look to their preferences and try to translate those into policy is a bit discombobulated. And I think we all like, you know, see the results. So you're saying that like the the literal structure of the election system, you're talking about stuff like the number of seats there are, who they represent, stuff like what day the

election is on those sorts of structural issues? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, these are the sort of things we like in academia call political institutions, right? These sort of rules and norms that govern, you know, our governing bodies and such. So yeah, you brought up the idea of the day the election is on, right? So me and you live in Los Angeles, and we just recently changed over to what's called on-cycle elections, right? So elections time up with the presidential calendar. And previously, So me and you live in Los Angeles and we just recently changed over to what's called on cycle elections. Right. So elections time up with the presidential calendar. And previously, these elections were in off years. You know, people weren't really paying attention to them.

I mean, it would be like the year that there wasn't a presidential or congressional election. It would be like two thousand like twenty thirteen when people are like, I don't even think about voting for another two years. And like some random day in October or whatever, there's an election for one of the most important offices in your city. No, and that's exactly right. So I mean, you know, everyone's busy, everyone has their life to live. And then all of a sudden there's an election. And so, you know, people with crammed schedules are expected to become sort of experts in a whole slew of candidates with really out without really any cues to guide their vote. And so what happens is, you know, just the most high propensity voters, the people with the sort of most interest in the system end up talking about cranky old people. Well, I mean, you know, you said it, not me.

You're talking about cranky old people. Well, I mean, you know, you said it, not me. Yeah, people are like, I heard what there's a new building going up and I don't like it. Like those sorts of, you know, I saw a man walking his dog and I've never seen him before. Like these these sort of people. Yeah. The sort of neighborhood character block. Right. That sort of want to encase their neighborhood like those mosquitoes in Jurassic Park in Amber to sort of live forever in perpetuity. I mean, it's one such constituency, but there's a lot of sort of special interest groups and a lot of people that are really

highly motivated to keep government a certain way. And those are the people that make the time to turn out. And so, I mean, in Los Angeles, we moved to on cycle, which meant that now our I believe like our local city council elections are always lined up with either the presidential election or the big midterm election. So that means that's the election that everybody is normally keyed into the average. I mean, less than we'd like in America, but still at least like 50 percent of the voting public is like really energized. And they're a lot easier to reach and they're more likely to show up. And that's like a way that the elections have become more democratic in Los Angeles. But there's a lot of there's there's still a lot of structures that are that are opposed to that direction that are still anti-democratic. Yeah, absolutely. So that's just one big example.

And California as a state has moved towards putting things on cycle. So when the news media is talking about elections, when you're seeing things about Congress and the presidency and stuff, you're kind of in the voting frame of mind. You're also voting in municipal elections here. It's not the case in every state, but here in California, we've made that switch. But there's other sort of structures too. You know, like in the United States, we sort of form our idea of what is like a faction, what is like an interest, right, around geography. So it kind of comes to this, you know, idea from the founding of the country that like

a person has person's largest identity and greatest loyalty is to their state and to their town and such, right? So we really structure our politics in this fashion. But a lot has changed in America since then, right? So someone's interests and someone's identity, sort of the people they identify with and sort of the causes they champion could have to do with someone across town or even someone in a different city. But here in Los Angeles and in most other American cities, you're sort of drawn into a district and that district is supposed to represent all your interests. But in a multi-ethnic city like Los Angeles, so many different people are living next to each other. There's really not that sort of common identity. And so this type of situation kind of it kind of like it kind of muddies the pot a bit. Yeah, I mean, you're right, because we especially because we so often look at politics through the lens of national politics, red states, blue states, red counties, blue cities.

blue cities you know we sort of assume oh everybody in a single place everybody in new york city everybody in chicago everybody in you know uh the a rural part of north dakota everybody those people must all have the same interests but that's just like not true like in the neighborhood where i live there's like five million dollar mansions and there are apartments that are you know extremely you know, dense apartments with, you know, where you've got working class people renting within like three or four miles of each other and certainly within the same district. And those people, to a certain extent, have different, if not competing interests. Like the rich homeowner says, I don't want any new buildings built, whereas the poor folks say, please, for the love of God, we need affordable housing. Right. And they're being represented by the same

person. And that's exactly right. And that's a perfect example of the sort of like conflict of interest within one little piece of ground. I mean, and, you know, to a certain other extent, people live in the city as a whole. I mean, you probably don't work in the same district where you live. Your friends don't all live in whatever council district you're at. I mean, we experience a city like Los Angeles as a series of places. I mean, I myself, I live in Los Angeles. I work in Riverside. So I'm traveling through all sorts of different polities on my way to the office every day. What about, you know, in New York? I lived in Brooklyn. I worked in Manhattan. I spent half literally 12 hours a day in Manhattan because I would go work. I do comedy. I took the subway there. And those things are not like I can't affect. I guess I got to vote for mayor, too. But, you know, my my local election was only for the place where I basically went to sleep, which is a little it's a little weird. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, you probably had a lot of interest, like in this part of Manhattan where you were working, maybe where you did your shows, where you went out to eat, where your friends lived, you know, but you can cast one vote and that's where you lay your head at night, even if it's not like where you're spending the majority of your time. Yeah. OK, that that's a very it's a very fundamental thing. Part of American democracy to unravel, though, because it is like just built in.

Yeah, you vote where you live and that's all you that you vote for. But that's true. That's like a really unexamined assumption of the system that like doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, I mean, it is right. I mean, this is sort of like a big philosophical point, right? I mean, eventually you have to sort of organize your political institutions around something. But there are other ways that are done around the world that sort of take this location-based system, right? I mean, everyone generally does it on that sort of principle and sort of expands the type of commonalities and common interests that bring people together and let people organize their politics and their interests.

So what are the harms of the way that we do it, right? Like, how do some of these institutions result in, before we talk about some of those better examples, or at least different examples, I don't know if we want to call them better yet, but what are, you know, what are the, how do these institutions prevent us from seeing, you know, outcomes that we might want to see in our own cities? Yeah. So, I mean, like, let's do an example of here Koreatown, right, which is split into several council districts. But in the part of town where I lived, right, I lived in a block that was primarily Spanish speakers. But if you walk a couple blocks to the south, it became a primarily Korean speaking neighborhood. Right. But these people were represented by one single person. Right. Yeah. There wasn't sort of a way for each community to have someone representing them at the city

council level, right? And you can see how this could be problematic in certain instances, right? These people have no one to sort of address complaints to. There's no one that sort of has an intimate familiarity with this community to sort of raise issues within the larger polity. And it leaves a lot of people unrepresented, which, you know, thinking about how we want to improve our democracy is something we should be working on. So what is the solution to that? I mean, you've got a minority in this larger district that, you know, presumably can't get anybody elected all by themselves. So the city council person barely knows that they exist, you know, Spanish speakers in Correaown. So how do we get those people representation?

Right. So, I mean, what a lot of other countries have done is move towards a system called multi-member districts. And I should probably back up and explain how things work in the United States. So in America, we have generally, I mean, there are some exceptions, but generally in the overwhelming instances of cases, we have a system based on single member districts, right? There is a single representative for each piece of geography. And so it doesn't matter really if there is a multitude of different peoples in your district, you get one person, right? And that person is elected on, well, there's a variety of names for this, but the most common is called first past the post voting. So whoever wins the plurality of votes,

right? Not a majority, but a plurality of votes, whoever gets this the most, you know? If there's three people running and you get 34%, then you win. Exactly correct, right? Then you're the winner, right? So it leaves us with this problem of wasted votes, right? And so we're in a redistricting cycle right now, both're the winner, right? So it leaves us with this problem of wasted votes, right? And so we're in a redistricting cycle right now, both congressionally, state level, and here in Los Angeles, redistricting has become this hugely contentious issue, right? And the problem with this redistricting is that you're sort of trying to work around this system of single member districts, right? And this first past the post voting.

So you're trying to sort of create sort of coherent communities by drawing a line. You know, a lot of other countries have sort of got around this by just electing more than one person per district, right? So rather than just a single member, you can have three, four, five members all within the same piece of ground.

This is mind blowing. This is another basic assumption of American democracy that, yeah, you vote for one person. So you could instead have three or four people who you would represent you. What in like a little, oh, kind of like you've got two senators for a state.

Exactly. Okay, got it. And I see. So how would that, so how does that help the folks in Koreatown? Well, sure. So let's like let's let's go back to Koreatown. Right. So, you know, Koreatown is actually or a slice of Koreatown is involved in this is really, really contentious debate. I mean, for the listeners that aren't in Los Angeles, there was a woman, Nithya Raman's her name, and she was one of the first people to unseat an incumbent in Los Angeles election. She was actually a guest on this podcast while she was running, and she did eventually win. Yes. Yeah. Oh, very cool. Well, yes. I mean, she unseated an incumbent for the first elections that was done on cycle in Los Angeles. So, I mean, 130,000 people voted in her election compared to just 24,000 the last time that seat was open. right now because Nithya Raman's district is being broken up, right?

A lot of it, it's this weird sort of kind of V that cuts through Los Angeles. Yeah, it's already gerrymandered the hell out of it, or at least, sorry, maybe gerrymandering is not the technical term for what happened. It's a very weird looking district. When you look at, you know, gerrymandered congressional districts, this kind of looks like that where it's all spread out this crazy shape. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly right.

I mean, like it's sort of one of the pitfalls of having just 15 members in a city as large as Los Angeles and as diverse as Los Angeles, right? So, I mean, in Nithya Ramam's district, you have sort of a Los Feliz hipsters and such. You have a big slice of Koreatown. And then it kind of jumps up into the um the the sherman oaks area just kind of single family homes like your typical idea conservative area yeah extremely extremely conservative area i mean yeah conservative as in like not the sort of conservative on the national scale but very sort of like we like things the way they are very

status i mean it's also where folks who are conservative on the national scale, that's where they live in Los Angeles. Like, like it's, it's both conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans up there. Yeah, true. I guess, I guess for conservative for Los Angeles. Yeah. I mean, you know, everything's on a spectrum, right?

So they're like conservatives who like, you know, have a couple of gay friends. You know what I mean? Like we're talking about, you know, have a couple of gay friends. You know what I mean? Like we're talking about. I mean, one of the one of the things in this, you know, one of the problems of talking about this is that our language in our political culture in America is so focused on the national that we always feel the need to say, oh, well, they're conservatives. Not in this. When like we're talking about these are people in city politics. They vote conservatively, you know, and it's but it's difficult for us to say that because we are so wedded to this national view. They're like conservatives locally, even though they voted for Joe Biden, whoever else. But, you know, on city politics, that's what they are. Sorry. Go on. I cut you off.

No, no, no. That's a really good point to bring up. Yeah. People like sort of conservatism expressed itself differently depending on the context. So, you know, Nithya Raman's district is being broken up and a lot of it is trying to sort of redraw this old base that she had of renters, of progressive activists. I know a lot of my friends in a group called Ground Game LA are working really hard against this redistricting because they were the people that got Council Member Rahman into office in the first place, right? But this is sort of illustrating this folly of the land-based system of voting, right? Because you have to draw a line around certain constituencies in order to get some sort of representation, you know, you can disenfranchise these people just simply by shifting a border up or down. Yeah. Well, that's the same thing that happens on the congressional

level with with gerrymandering. And it happens in our cities, too. It's happening in the city. It's by the way, if you're listening, I know we're talking about Los Angeles a lot. This is probably happening in the city that you live in. You probably just don't know about it because your local newspaper was closed because of Facebook and you're very busy and you have a lot of time in your hands and nobody's writing about this. So, you know, this is it is a weird perversity that this happens. So how would how would multi-member districts solve this problem? Yeah, right. So, I mean, the big thing to think about is that people's primary allegiance isn't just as some piece of ground, right? There's stronger identities that cut across geography and unite people that might be living in disparate parts of the city. and electing people along a system of proportional representation, which we haven't talked about yet, but is sort of the way of a lot of European democracies, how they allocate seats in a legislative body.

So one of the advantages of this system of allocating a number of seats based on the proportion of votes you get in an election is it sort of breaks this stranglehold that two parties have on legislative contests, right? So given a system that allows more parties to flourish, right, people have these better voting queues. And so you can sort of form these larger slates to sort of attract voters given different sort of bents, different interests, and that sort of thing. And so, for example, you could start to have a slate of candidates all organizing around renters' rights in Los Angeles, where the renter party. of candidates all organizing around renters' rights in Los Angeles, right? So we're the renter party. And so renters, right? An identity that cuts across not just one little piece of land. These sort of people can look at a ballot, see renters' party and say, oh, this is the party for me. Check it. And depending on if they get over a certain threshold, they can have a person representing them within their district, right?

There's a person that they could turn to to redress their most basic complaints. I see. So maybe in a big district like CD4, that's the one that I live in, the one that Nithyaraman represents, where you've got the rich homeowners and you've got the hipsters, and then you've got folks in Koreatown. You have an ethnic enclave that has its own interests and concerns. Right. That's these are very different places physically, you know, across the district. You've got the rich mansions in the hills. You've got the folks in Silver Lake and you've got, you know, Koreatown is a totally different sort of physical area with different economic profile. Each of those areas would get, you know, there. Oh, there could be the renter party. There could be the hipster party and there could be the hipster party, and there could be the rich fucko party, right?

And each one of them gets a, you know, if each of them gets X percentage of the vote, they each get one representative for the district, and they can sort of, what, form a coalition, maybe the hipster and the Korean representative get together on a particular issue they both like? I don't know. And and they sort of a little bit closer to what the way parliamentary democracies work or. No, that's exactly right. So, I mean, OK, it creates a

system in which you really are forced to have compromise between these parties. Right. What we have in Los Angeles right now is just single party dominance. Everyone in Los Angeles is a Democrat. I know John Lee, a representative up in the Valley, is a no party preference. He was previously a Republican, but I guess that's not cool anymore. So he is no party listed. But you really just have one party in Los Angeles politics. And you can see this kind of creates a problem, right? Because our system of electoral accountability is precipice on this idea that when the party in power isn't doing well, right? And it isn't sort of working for you, you throw the bums out, right? And you put the other party in power. But you don't have this

in Los Angeles. Everyone's a Democrat by default. And so as a result, you really don't have a cue except for learning about a certain candidate, right? Like kind of becoming encyclopedic, which a lot of people don't have the capacity for. Well, and there's, man, there's so many problems with that. I mean, first of all, let's just acknowledge there's Republicans in Los Angeles, and perhaps those folks could have some representation as well. You know what I mean? Like if you're a Democrat in Los Angeles, you're like, yeah, fuck them. But like, I mean, in reality, I think we would want some amount of representation for like having minority representation of all types is like important in a, in democracy. That's one thing. But then, yeah, for another, it's like you end up with this weird like belief or this weird artifice that all the candidates are somehow identical because they're all Democrats.

So it's like, you know, every single candidate in or let's say every single politician in Los Angeles who are all Democrats are all members of the Democratic Party. They all said, yes, Joe Biden is so good and I support gay rights and all on all those national issues. They're basically claiming to be identical. But when in reality, their actual positions on things that affect the city, things like homelessness, things like construction, things like transportation, they have wildly different positions, but nobody has the tools to talk about that. They literally don't even bring up their positions. So they're just like, I'm a Democrat. I love Democratic shit. But it's all national. They're like, I'm for gun control. Yeah, who gives a shit? We're talking about whether or not affordable housing should be constructed,

which is not part of the National Democratic Party platform. So you end up with this weird situation where a Democrat runs against a Democrat and they have trouble even they're like, I'm the progressive. No, I'm the progressive. And like the one that actually is progressive or conservative on a city level has trouble even explaining how different they are because nobody even has the vocabulary. And there's no party apparatus. There's no block of people that's saying, okay, we're going to pick the best

affordable housing person, you know, for the affordable housing party, because there's just one party. There's only one apparatus. So it means that like, yeah, we end up with no choice at all. No, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so, you know, it really puts this sort of undue burden and I think anti-democratic burden on voters, right? So in order to figure out how to best vote your preferences, you need to become encyclopedic about a certain candidate, right? You need to know like their positions on this, what they said five years ago, et cetera,

et cetera. And then you have to do this for every single candidate for office, right? So you have to do this for your assembly member. You have to do this for your member of the state Senate, right? And on and on and on. Oh, yeah. And it's impossible to do that. Like I, okay. So like I follow local politics. I've, over the last couple of years, I've become encyclopedic about it. And the problem is it's something I can't expect other people to do. You know, like I was talking to a friend who lives in a different district than me. And, um, she was like, oh yeah, we have a really good councilwoman. I saw like an ad for her. And I was like,

no, actually she's really bad. Like I know your values and I know that your council person does not agree with your values, but it's going to take me half an hour to explain to you why, because it's not covered in any paper. There's no party running against her. I just have to go through and go like, okay, so like six months ago, she did this thing. And then she said she was going to do that thing, but she did this thing instead. And then, you know, she betrayed this constituency and all these people got really mad at her and blah, blah, blah. And it's like this constituency and all these people got really mad at her and blah, blah, blah. And it's like overwhelming to have to explain this individually to every single voter when this person is just in the district going, hey, I'm a good Democrat. And everyone goes, OK, well, that seems good to me.

No, that's exactly right. And I mean, like, you know, it's a very inefficient way of doing things too, right? You only have so much time in your day and you can't go and explain to every single person in Los Angeles, you know, everything there is to know. There was a really important study on this done about 30 years ago by a political scientist then at the University of California, San Diego, Arthur Lupia is his name. And the paper was called Shortcuts versus Encyclopedias, right? So Dr. Lupia looked at a series of competing ballot initiatives for insurance reform in California, something really esoteric that no one really has much idea about. And so what he showed was that sort of just kind of summarizing the paper, people could vote their deepest held preference, right? If you surveyed them, asked them about their positions on

everything, they could vote almost perfectly accurate just by looking at which group endorsed, right? Or which politician endorsed which position on this insurance reform versus actually sitting down with the text of the law and a legal expert there explaining all the minutia and jargon to them, right? And becoming this encyclopedia about it, right? This shortcut is just about as efficient. And this is where I think parties can step in. I think party queues are an extremely valuable shortcut for voters, right? And it helps them sort of organize their preferences. And it helps them sort of see, okay, I can just look at a ballot and see renter party or rich fucko party if you happen to be a rich fucko. And then, look, this is me. This is my person here. Bang. You hit him with a vote and you're good.

But OK, so why don't we have parties like that on a local, I mean, I understand why, you know, my, I've done television about it before, about how on a national level, when you have first past the post voting, it creates, uh, it creates an incentive to have just two parties, like sort of mathematically game, theoretically, everything boils down and you end up with two parties. It's very hard for a third party to get a foothold is the same true locally. Is that the deal? Yeah, that's exactly it, right? Well, I always love it when my guests say, as you say often, that's exactly right. That's why I have the podcast. In fact, I should read in the podcast, that's exactly right, Adam. I'm sorry, please go on. Explain it to me.

Well, you know, just here validating you. No, but the system works sort of like this. There's a sort of axiom in political science called Duverger's Law. And it's named after this French sociologist, Maurice Duverger. It's not exactly a law. I know a bunch of, you know, the five political scientists that are listening to this right now are going to quibble about how actually set in concrete it is, but you know, like that's for our personal conferences. That's why we're so much fun. But having first past the post voting where the plurality winner wins the election, right? Having these winner take all elections and having these single member districts really sort of penalizes third parties because third parties become vote wasters, right? So if you vote for one of these parties and they have no shot of getting in, then essentially you're just throwing your vote away. It doesn't really matter, right? I mean, you could be voting a sincerely held preference.

There's a lot of other reasons to vote, but most people are voting instrumentally, right? You want someone in there that shares your beliefs about something. I mean, talk about the, you know, the Green Party in the, you know, the 2000 election and the 2004 election. Basically what happened to that party, there was a real desire among a lot of people to have a more left wing party, especially because the Democratic Party was much more of a right wing party at the time. But I mean, it's exactly the dialogue that you saw happen where people would say, well, vote for Ralph Nader. But, I mean, it's exactly the dialogue that you saw happen where people would say, well, vote for Ralph Nader. No, if you vote for Ralph Nader, you're throwing away your vote. And then Ralph Nader gets blamed for George W. Bush being elected. And whether you agree with that blame or don't agree with that blame, the fact that people are having that argument and saying, no, you have to vote strategically and vote for Gore instead, that is making it less possible for a Green Party to flourish.

And that would happen basically any anytime you have a third party. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, there was a similar sort of thing around the Tea Party movement of 2010 with libertarian Republicans. Right. Do you vote for the libertarian or do you throw your vote away or should you not throw your vote away and just kind of give it to a Republican candidate, even though their beliefs about, I don't know, a variety of whatever libertarian things don't really mesh with yours. Right. Yeah. But there's sort of a flip side to that as well. And that's in this system, it makes sense for parties to sort of expand their platform to swallow up these voters. So, you know, the Democratic Party loses all these green votes in 2000, and to a lesser extent in 2004. But at the same time, the Democratic Party sort of expands what is acceptably Democrat, right? If you look at the Democratic Party's positions on immigration in the 90s, like they're almost analogous to a lot of, you know, conservative Republican positions on immigration right now. It's completely changed. I mean,

like look at Hillary Clinton's speech on immigration, the 2016 Democratic Convention, right? It's strategic. Parties exist to win elections and get partisans into office. And so these parties sort of expand their issue platforms until they can grab up those third party voters, right? And that sort of leads this two party stasis. Right. And that sort of leads this two party stasis. That's the essence of DuPage's law. Got it. So is there. Oh, wait. OK, I'm sorry. We have to take a quick break because I really want to find out if there's a way to break this law when it comes to our local cities. But we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Stan at Club Gia. We're back with Stan at Club Gia. Stan, so you've been explaining how multi-member districts and proportional elections would be much better for our cities. But I got to say, I've been around for a while.

I've heard a lot of, hey, it sure would be better to vote this or that way. And, you know, a lot of pie in the sky election theorizing. I always worried that if I go to school for political science, this is what I would do is I would just find out about a lot of theoretically great voting systems. How the hell do we implement any of these? Well, I mean, you know, there's, you know, a lot of different ways that you can sort of push reform, right? It'd be a little bit naive to think that the incumbents that benefit from our current system would just sort of voluntarily cede their grasp on power and just kind of, you know, do the right thing for America. It's a very,

like, I don't know, West Wing vision of politics. But here in California, we do have an initiative process, right? A city can change its charter if a majority of voters wish to see it done. So that's one avenue if you're in a state with this sort of progressive, I mean, progressive in the turn of the turn of the 20th century version set of political institutions where you can put a thing on a ballot and make big structural reform that way. And there are initiatives in states other than California. California is famous for having an initiative process, but there's initiatives in, I know, Michigan. Like, do you know how many how many states have initiative or ballot measures like that? Oof, I believe it's about 23 of the 50 states. That's almost half. That's not bad.

There's 50, right? Yeah, 23. So, yes, almost half. No, exactly right. So, I mean, like, California is the real big initiative machine, but Colorado, Oregon, Washington are all big initiative states. Nevada has it. And a lot of sort of big legislation, really consequential legislation in a lot of these states have come via the ballot box. Got it. So we could potentially, if we want, if we build support for multi-member districts, like put that on a ballot initiative and really try to, I don't know, get it, get the public to have their say on it.

But I don't know. I still have the concern that so much of the time, our political system is driven by the folks who are trying to keep everything the same, right? The wealthy folks who don't want to see affordable housing be built are still in control of so many of our local governments across the country.

Right. And those people are a lot better at organizing and they're able to get a lot defeated and they might not like this proposal. Right. Because it reduces their like, hold on a second. I don't want multi-member districts because currently our single member is the white wealthy homeowner like me. So I don't want multi-member districts. I don't want those folks in Koreatown getting their candidate in. And they can mobilize against it and, you know, raise money to run ads against it.

And, you know, those folks are powerful. I mean, we had a ton of really great ballot initiatives defeated in California, you know, just last year. So, I mean, how do we overcome that? Yeah, so I mean, how do we overcome that? Yeah. So, I mean, like there is a history of voters and large coalitions overcoming these really like entrenched structural biases. So I'm a political scientist and I have to say that these are a very bad thing and we should do away with them. But a great example of this is term limits, right? Term limits was an extremely anti-incumbent movement, right?

It was very unpopular amongst entrenched interest groups. And it passed. And it passed not just in California, but via the initiative process around the West. Oh, OK. So there was I actually never thought of this. There's a time at which there were no term limits. And then people were like, this is fucking bullshit. We've got, you know mr bill fucko i keep

going for the same stupid the same reaching for the same stupid name bill fucko's been in there 50 years and he's a pawn of the whatever interests and and we gotta get back we gotta and we gotta institute term limits and then what there was just like a populist uprising around term limits yeah sort of i mean populist with big quotes i, there was a sort of like, I don't know, conservative underswell kind of a little kind of overtone of this movement. But, yeah, I mean, I personally think term limits are a horrible idea. They are lobbyists and special interests really prevent the development of expertise amongst elected officials and their staff. Whoa, wait, that's really interesting. Little parenthetical.

I just want to hear a little bit more about that. Because, yeah, you would I would think that with the vision that I just laid out, where you've got someone running something for like way too long would be a I would think that would be a problem that that would be real. But you actually find the other what is this other problem that you think is worse? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of sort of empirical research on this, but essentially a member of an elected body never really has the chance to develop expertise, right? So all expertise has to be farmed out. And those places where it's farmed out are lobbying groups. They're interest groups,

right? You can't learn about the minutia of, I don't know, tax policy or something like that in just a couple of years. It's impossible, right? Your staff absolutely cannot develop this sort of expertise. So you just call up some group or a lobbyist shows up in your office and says, hey, let me explain it for you. Let me down for you, right? So here's an analysis of this bill. We're doing this out of the goodness of our heart. And really, that sort of structure kind of overwhelms the legislative process. That's really interesting. But wait, I can I can really see it both ways, because, OK, like, let me just I've been getting more and more involved in union democracy. Right. I'm in two unions. One of the unions, I'm a member of. I'm actually in the board of directors now,

I should say. I won an election for it. Right. And the term limit for the presidency of the unions I'm a member of, I'm actually on the board of directors now, I should say, I won an election for it, right? And the term limit for the presidency of the union is four years, which is short, right? And I can totally see that problem that, you know, the president is only there for four years before a new president has to come in. They have to learn the ropes. And that empowers people like the staff members of the union who are there for, you know, decades and decades. And so maybe now the elected representative of the membership doesn't get their say. Right. So I understand your argument there. But on the other hand, there's another union in town called IATSE. That's the the union that represents the camera crews and basically basically all the crews. Right. Makeup and hair and costumes and the grips and all those people. Right. And the president of that union, I'm

actually not sure. I don't believe there's term limits because I believe the same dude's been running it since 2008 or 2009. Right. And so I'm looking at that going now, a lot of I'm hearing a lot of members of that union saying, hold on a second. How do we create change? This guy is so entrenched that we are having trouble changing the leadership of the union that we don't feel represented. Yet this dude is like so entrenched that we can't get him out of there because he's just been working the levers of power for so long. Right. I can see that as being the opposite problem where you get the you get the boss of Tammany Hall effect where you just get this like person who's a who's a king can never be removed. Is that not a concern? Well, sure. Yeah. I mean, you do have like this sort of boss

tweet thing, but I think the solution to that and it's the reason I've become so in favor of multi-member districts and proportional representation, not just in cities like Los Angeles, but across the country, is to make better election rules, right? Make democratic accountability stronger such that if a person does want to stay in office, they have more to fear from voters throwing them out. They can't just manipulate rules. They can't sort of rely on this incumbency effect and sort of this overwhelming information bias that sort of prevents people from seeing actually like, that their interests aren't being represented and taking appropriate action to kick them out of office. So we come up with other methods for for the to make sure that they're being responsive,

like basically no term limits, but we make it a lot easier to kick them out so that, you know, they are really incentivized to, like, keep keep their ear to the ground and be representing their their constituents. No, that's exactly right. And I think sort of creating conditions where you can have more parties allows for better democracy, right? These shifting coalitions that have to form in order for government to function in these sort of systems, it creates a better system of democratic accountability, right? There's a political scientist at Drexel University, his name's Jack Santucci. He has a book coming out about this sort of showing that, you know, electoral systems producing more parties sort of has these like better outcomes on democracy. Yeah. But OK, so let's say that I agree with you that that more parties are better for democracy. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't like parties or politicians, right?

There's like a gut reaction that people have to like, I don't like politicians. I don't like political parties. Less would be better, right? And that seems like that would be a barrier to us doing a ballot initiative that says, hey, we need more political parties. If I go to people in California, hey, vote yes or no. Create a system with more political parties and three times as many politicians. Oh, no, hold on. I'll explain to you. I'll explain to you why this is good. No, no, I know. I know. It sounds like I'm telling you to like create more

lawyers in the world or something like that. But no, in fact, this would be good for you. It seems like a tough sell. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know what the latest approval figures on Congress, but I think like cockroaches and like communism had a higher approval rating than Congress the last time I looked. But there is something for everybody in this system. If you were to expand a city council like Los Angeles or wherever you live, right? Los Angeles is just particularly bad in the number of constituents per representative. If you expanded the number of elected officials, you created a system where more than one person could represent a piece of geography, and you allocated those seats

by proportional representation via a whole variety of systems, there could be, and there probably would be, if you have like sort of a semi-mainstream political bent to you, there could be someone, there could be an entire party representing you and your interests in in in on a city council right you mean literally just me

adam like the adam party and they just represent me personally well i don't know the tenants of the adam party but you seem like a pretty normal guy so i'm going to go out oh no you don't know if you give me power you don't know what I would what I would put in place, man. I don't know if you want to see that situation. We'd all be wearing pants on our heads. OK, no, you mean I could be more directly represented by someone who like really like I like I love I'm a you know, I'm I there'd be like an urbanism party. That's all about building bike lanes that I could join. You're talking about that kind of thing. No, absolutely right. So, I mean, I got into this, sort of electoral systems aren't really my forte. They weren't really this thing that kind of got

me into academia. Like this came from doing housing activism for a while, trying to fix the housing crisis in Los Angeles and across California. And we keep butting up against the exact same thing, right? These political institutions constrain progress. But you don't have to just be a housing activist. You don't have to just be someone that's into housing, right? If you're, for example, a democratic socialist, there's a reason why left parties don't really exist to the extent that they do in Europe here in the United States, right? There's a reason why left parties don't really exist to the extent that they do in Europe here in the United States, right? It has to do a lot with how people concentrate in areas, right? The fact that, you know, it's unviable for a small group of people representing

sort of, you know, an interest that is, you know, is real, and it's held by many people, but will never kind of win a plurality, is a reason why these people never get any representation. There's a really great book by a professor of political science from Stanford named Jonathan Rodden called Why Cities Lose, which I encourage everyone sort of in one of these left movements to read and see just sort of how the geography of where factories are located and how it just kind of compacts workers together into one area, how that created two separate political realities in Europe versus the United States, just based on the rules of elections. But wait, okay, look, I don't know that much about European politics. I do know that there are

left-wing parties, but I also know that there's right-wing racist, just like a validly racist parties, just parties like we are for white people and we want to kick out anybody who's not white and we want to kill them all. And when I hear political news out of Europe, it's always like, oh no, one of those parties is winning. It's never like, oh, the ideal idealistic left wingers who want to build all the bike lanes won. Right. It's always like, oh, here comes Hitler to in France or whatever. So is that not a little bit of a concern? I mean, you know, because we have had I got to say, you know, the two party system in America did sort of squelch out,

you know, a lot of like avowedly racist, you know, like David Duke, you know, couldn't didn't have a party to represent him for a long time. He's like, couldn't couldn't buy an endorsement, you know, as a result of our two party system. So is that a concern at all from systems like this? Well, I have to shout out a friend of mine, Lee Drutman at the New America Institute, who wrote a great book called The Two Party Doom Loop, which everyone should really check out. It's a fantastic book. And if you're interested in proportional representation and sort of these reforms nationally, like it's a fantastic place. You seem like a guy who reads a lot faster than me. And you're like, and you should read this one and read this one. They're really great. I'm like, OK, man, you've already given me nine months of assigned reading, but they sound great. These

sound terrific. Um, please, please go on. Please go on. It's why you make the big bucks in academia, right? Um, no. So, um, the thing with, uh, you know, the far right parties in Europe and Lee writes about this a lot in his book and in other, um, in other sort of venues is that these far right parties, um, do exist, right. And they exist with sort of platforms, is that these far-right parties do exist, right? And they exist with sort of platforms, explicit platforms that are horrendous, I mean, to the average American. But the way proportional representation works in these electoral systems sort of relegates a lot of them to the fringe, right? So one of the problems we have and are currently having in the United States is that, you know, we do have far-right authoritarian white nationalist parties

in America. They're just subsumed within the current Republican Party. And given how you don't need a majority of voters to win power in the United States, right? You can be a president with 3 million fewer votes. You can hold the Senate by representing 40 million fewer people. It gives a lot more agency to these elements that would be more fringe, given a more representative system of government. Wow, because it's basically the same way that in a city like L.A. where everyone is a Democrat or every elected official is a Democrat, you can have

people who are actually, you know, very opposed to Democratic values, but they're running as a Democrat because they're just like under this label and they're just sort of subsumed within it. That's how you end up with white nationalist Republicans. Whereas instead, if they had their own party that everyone could just sort of like spit and throw tomatoes at. Right. If that's where the white nationalists were, then they would be like perhaps a little more easily marginalized rather than just sort of like waltzing their way into Congress. So if you live in rural Georgia, right, and you're deciding who to vote for for Congress, right, and let's say you're a kind of a conservative voter, you know, you're a religious person, you sort of have a set of traditional values or whatever, right? You don't have to

vote for someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, because there would be an alternative conservative party for you. She would be represented by sort of this fringe white nationalist element. And it sort of kind of inoculates the body politic in that way. Yeah. Okay. All right. But like, okay, again, so I said, how do we get this instituted? Right. And you said, well, hey, there's something in there for everybody, but that's like, once you explain it to them, you know, how do we, how do we actually, uh, you know, if I want to in my city or the city of someone listening, like, okay, great. I want multi-member districts and I want some kind of structure that fosters multiple parties. Um, how do we, you know, what's the, what's the next step to, to putting it in

place? Well, I mean, every city is going to be different. Every city has its own unique cultures, its own unique rules, and that sort of thing. But I think this discontent with the state of city politics is a really good place to start. Because I don't think there's many people out there in the United States that sort of look at their city, they look at like the homelessness crisis, they look at the skyrocketing cost of housing. They look at unaccountable police forces, right? Who won't even submit to the most basic health requirements. They don't see this as something good and something really worth preserving, right? So there is this growing appetite for reform in America.

And I think, you know, if we sort of realize that despite you know maybe having different policy goals right like maybe i'm a pro housing person and someone else wants to have um sort of a police force that doesn't monopolize the entire city budget um maybe there's even a rich fucko who wants a good thing or two yeah i mean i'm a rich fucko and I want some good stuff. Yeah, sure. So we, like, you know, our, our interests align and we realize we have more to gain helping each other out. Right. And sort of more to gain by having a more inclusive system than just this broken status quo. Okay. All right. All right. It's still, it's still at the end of the day, I was gonna say, well, it's still a hearts and minds approach at the end of the day. But I guess I guess that's what it has to be. There's just going to be those people who are saying who who are fighting against it tooth and nail, you know.

Like, actually, let me even take it further back than that. Something that I've come to realize through talking to you and through talking to other folks like you is that we really underapp the structure, democratic structure that we live in and that like we really could change the structure to one that's better, that would be more representative. And until we do, we will never have represented. It doesn't matter. Maybe we'll have one good one for a term or two, but, you know, it'll be we'll have we'll have over and over again people who don't represent their values and will be frustrated. And so we need to make these changes. And yet it seems so difficult. But over the last year, there have been a couple of thaws in this, like New York City, I believe, went for what is it? Oh, what's it called? Instant runoff voting, right? Which is allows people to express a preference beyond first past the post

actually explain how that works yeah so instant runoff voting is um a way of ranking your preferences for a candidate you're still operating within a single member district but it sort of helps get rid of this wasted vote um problem right so you can say that um i would want the green party candidate or whatever as my first choice but even if you know that person has no chance of winning you can still put um the sort of democrat or whatever underneath right so when a person no longer becomes viable their first um they become ineligible and then their second choice moves up to first yeah Yeah. Yeah. So you can vote for, okay, I'm going to vote for Ralph Nader first and then Hillary Clinton, but well,

Ralph Nader didn't run against Hillary Clinton, but let's just imagine that, that he did. And, and Hillary Clinton second. And then once Ralph Nader gets only 10% of the vote or whatever, he's knocked off and now they count your second vote. And so it's a way of like being able to vote for who you really give a

shit about without having to strategically, you know, change your vote to somebody else. Yeah, that's exactly it. Right. And so, I mean, you can sort of modify instant runoff voting for a proportional representation system. It's a system called single transferable vote. So you're essentially doing the exact same thing, ranking candidates. but instead of just having one winner, you have multiple winners, right? And depending on the manner in which single transferable vote is implemented, either people become unviable or people take seats. And then the second choices are distributed sort of along some sort of formula to the other candidates.

So New York actually implemented instant runoff voting. And then in LA, they actually did change the date of the election from, you know, some weirdo day in, you know, an off, off, off year where nobody showed up except for all the cranky olds and the rich fuckos. And instead they made it line up, which completely changed the electorate.

And it actually resulted in an incumbent being unseated for the first time ever and could happen more. It's I think I would have to say it's made it more likely for incumbents to be unseated overall across Los Angeles. And the people who are the incumbents actually decided to make that change. And so why? Why? You know, what caused I guess what I'm curious to know is what what caused in both of those these old sclerotic democratic systems controlled by a single party in New York and L.A., what caused the people who run that system to go, you know what, we should actually make a better change, even though it didn't necessarily benefit those individual politicians to do so. individual politicians to do so? State preemption, right? I mean, so a lot of these changes were forced on cities. I mean, not forced, but kind of maybe cuddled along, but in some cases actually forced by state legislation, right? You know, it's one of the benefits of American federalism is we have these sort of bodies that rule over other bodies, right? And sort of create a set of ground rules by which all local governments would have to exist, right? So I mean, a lot of housing activism is done at the state level because you're never going

to go convince like Santa Monica or Newport Beach or Cupertino to like, hey, maybe it would be nice if you built housing that non-millionaires could live in. I don't know, just a thought, right? So you sort of cudgel them along with state regulations, right? So a lot of these reforms could also be implemented by state bodies as well. It creates a better system and a more equitable and representative system for local governments, which I think personally would be in the interest of the state to pursue. It's another avenue for activists is what I'm saying.

Is there a, are there any brewing movements to do any of these things in places like our multi-member districts? Do they exist anywhere in America today? Well, they do. There's a sort of system of at large representation. Right. So many people will represent a city as a whole. I don't know if that's my preferred and that would run afoul of the California Voter Rights Act here. preferred, and that would run afoul of the California Voter Rights Act here. But what you could do is sort of have like kind of compromise systems where you create districts that incorporate communities of color and certain other protected communities as defined by the California Voting Rights Act and simply allow for more than one person to come from them.

Yeah. It's just, it's again, just fascinating how much of our political lives is determined by structure like this for folks who want who are just getting turned on to this idea. Right. And want to understand more about like, hey, maybe I should focus less on the candidates and more on the structure. What is a good place for them to start to learn more about this stuff? Well, if you want to learn a lot about election reform, Lee Drutman's book, Ending the Two-Party Doom or Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop is a fantastic place to start. There's a book by a collection of political scientists called A Different Democracy, Matthew Shugart from UC Davis and a whole host of others whose names I forget off the top of my head. Apologies to those folks. But there's a lot of other sort of movements kind of brewing at the local level. None really sort of like taking the mantle as like, this is the leading champion of reforms. But there's a lot of places out there. And I think just honestly

connecting with people in your local community and try to get these things implemented yourself so that your place could be the example. It might be the way to go. Yeah. Amazing. Well, I'll tell you what, we'll put some of those books on our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. If you want to pick them up. And if you want to support the show and your local bookshop, that'll help you do that. Stan, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been incredible to talk to you. This is, this has been really cool. Yeah. And thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun. Appreciate it.

Cool. Adam, thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. Appreciate it. Well, thank you once again to Santa Club Gia for coming on the show. I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. Once again, if you like the show, shoot me an email at factually at adamconover.net.

I do love to read your emails all the time. And if you want to pick up any books from any of our incredible guests you've heard on the show, visit factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for doing our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at Adam Conover,

wherever you get your social media or at adamconover.net. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually.