Your Neighbour's Lordship
Local government is not for you
I. Why Voters Disengage
Wrong political beliefs are cheap, better political beliefs are expensive, correct political beliefs are probably unobtainable. The currency they’re traded in is time potentially spent doing something else, such as working or relaxing.
Unique among hobbies, those who devote a lot of time to improving these beliefs want to convince others that this is a socially righteous thing to do. How else are good policies going to come about, if not from better-informed voters?
These epistemic hobbyists (or news junkies, politicos, etc.) might well be right, in that things would get better if a majority of people invested the time to get very informed. The point they often miss is that the average person has no incentive to do so.1
You, reader, are an epistemic hobbyist. But many of your friends aren’t. They do not derive psychological satisfaction from scrutinizing their political beliefs and updating them according to the best evidence that comes their way. Instead, these folks might vote based on:
Party identity, probably inherited from mum or dad
Social desirability bias, potentially wanting to get on your good side
Material wellbeing
TikTok clips
These heuristics are useful because bettering one’s beliefs is really expensive if you don’t get pleasure out of it—it takes a lot of time and offers a near-zero payout. The thinking behind that is found inside this calculation:
Where the expected payout from voting is equal to the expected benefit of the winning candidate multiplied by the probability of being the deciding vote, subtracting the cost of voting (the next best thing you could be doing with that time).2
To think about the expected benefit, you have to compare to the alternative, so if you’re a Republican voter, that’s going to be a Democratic win. I’m of the opinion that the American parties are very far apart on most issues, so the expected benefit is going to be high, regardless of where you stand. The recent Canadian election was an example of the two competitive parties being quite close on the issues, leaving the expected benefit low.
When it comes to the probability of being decisive, the math works out to approximately 1/sqrt(N) if the election is expected to be a coinflip.3 These are not common. Most elections are not close and not expected to be close. A congressional race with a 1% polling lead for either side will give each voter less than a 1/100,000 chance of being decisive; a 5% polling lead gives each voter less than a 1/1,000,000 chance.4 The odds get exponentially worse from there.
Let’s assume my Congressman, if elected, will flip Congress and get George Santos the speaker’s gavel and income per capita will rise by an extra 1% per year because of his thoughtful policies. He’s in a tight race and down 2% in the polls. Let’s also assume I make the median American income of $42,000. o3 calculates the expected lifetime payout from voting in this case at just over one cent.5
If voting is mostly about carrying on the family tradition, or pleasing your friends, or loosely judging the direction of the country, there isn’t much reason to deeply engage and form better political beliefs.
This is bad if democracy is supposed to be a culture of reasoned deliberation about how we, as a society, should move forward. It is less bad if the main goal of democracy is, as one commenter here put it, ‘to throw out the current leaders without bloodshed if average people perceive things as having gotten worse recently.’
I want to explain why these dynamics shift at the local level and four problems they raise for that level of government.
II. Why the Elderly Engage
You’ll often hear two claims parroted about:
Local elections have the greatest direct impact on their electorates
They are dominated by one demographic—the elderly6
Municipal governments do control a lot, including zoning, property taxes, policing, snow-clearing, transit, waste management, and more. These are the sorts of things that interact with one’s daily routine more than other government functions tend to.
And they are in fact dominated by old folk. Here’s a 2024 paper which finds:
In every city in our sample, older homeowners make up a disproportionate share of the electorate. Put differently, there is no city that is effectively mitigating these turnout disparities.
Moreover, while turnout disparities are omnipresent across all cities and election types, they are considerably worse the more local elections are separated from other contests. Nearly 60% of cities hold their elections separately from midterm or presidential contests, ensuring that older homeowners are starkly overrepresented in a wide swath of American communities.
Why is this? To begin, since the stakes are generally larger in local elections and electorates are necessarily smaller, everyone enjoys a higher expected benefit from going to vote (assuming the election is similarly close). This is not, in principle, limited to the elderly.
What is limited is the amount of cheap time available to devote to learning about municipal issues. As I would like to write about in the future, local journalism is in the gutter. It is an out of the way thing to learn these things when the local paper isn’t part of everyday life. National politics can be absorbed via passive knowledge acquisition; municipal politics can only be known by active knowledge acquisition.
Working people’s time is more expensive than that of retirees, putting them at a systemic disadvantage when it comes to this active acquisition.
In addition, older residents are disproportionately homeowners, who can expect greater benefit from their vote than renters. This is intuitive; renters have a fuzzier idea of where they will live ten years down the line than homeowners and must, as a result, consider the timelines where they do not remain in the municipality.
The overrepresentation of the elderly can then be explained by their lower information costs and more certain benefits.
III. The Problem of Permanent Minorities
In a democracy, everyone bears the risk of not getting to make decisions for some period of time. That is, everyone accepts that they may be part of a temporary minority on any given issue for a time. Winning and losing coalitions ebb and flow.
At least that’s the ideal, generally speaking. However, it can sometimes be the case that someone never wins on any of the issues that are important to them. A group of such people is a permanent minority.
The existence of such minorities is a problem for democratic institutions. This is because they are founded upon a principle of political equality. Now, giving everyone a vote is a form of equality, but it’s a formal equality, disconnected from the motivating idea behind the principle. That idea is that by virtue of our moral equality, we should each get an equal influence on collective decision-making. Substantive equality would mean the realization of this ideal.
When a permanent minority exists, formal equality goes on existing. After all, everybody is being given their vote. However, substantive equality vanishes. One group never gets to influence the collective’s decisions.
Given domination by the elderly, as argued for in Section II, there is a serious risk of local governments falling into the problem of permanent minority—namely, the non-elderly.
It could be objected that this group will gradually morph into the majority group over time, ergo it is not a permanent minority. This misses the point. The problem is more precisely the shutting out of the unique and legitimate interests represented by the non-elderly. While the non-elderly’s membership will change over time, their interests will not. They face long-term disenfranchisement.
This can, in theory, be mitigated by adopting a system of proportional representation, and many municipalities do take this route. However, if the dynamics are as described, proportional representation will not prevent 60% of an electorate voting in lockstep from forming a majority and making 100% of the decisions.
IV. The Problem of Corruption
Corruption, loosely speaking, is abusing the public powers vested in oneself to privately benefit oneself. Municipal government is more vulnerable to corruption of this sort, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it is harder for the public to spot. There are often limited formal oversight bodies in local government and a great deal less investigative pressures from journalists. Auditors can spot obvious graft, but they aren’t equipped to expose off-book arrangements or misleading justifications for ‘properly’ allocated funds. Lowering the probability of getting caught increases corruption’s expected value.
Secondly, mayors are high-value marks for bribes. Their salaries rarely exceed $250k, creating an opening. Eric Adams was bribed by the Turkish government to get their real estate approvals shepherded through a long and difficult process, and they did it for less than $150k. Dallas mayor Dwaine Caraway received $450k to advance city contracts; Oakland mayor Sheng Thao got $170k for similar ends; Charlotte mayor Patrick Cannon, $48k. It’s lucky that these folks got caught, as mayoral favours can be difficult to identify as such—despite being extremely valuable.
Thirdly, the impact of social networks is much more pronounced when the scale of government gets smaller. So-called old boy clubs can perpetuate when everyone knows each other and have for some time. This chills speaking out, due to intimidation and risk of ostracization. Simultaneously, it creates reasons to reward mutual friends and to cut deals which tow the line of private benefit.
In places where domination by the elderly prominently exists, one should expect such network effects to be more pronounced. The plausible intuition here is that they have had more time to form and cement their social groups. Small, stable, cohesive social groups are the most susceptible to the more subtle forms of corruption.
A smaller concern related to size in the modern age—but a real one—is the threat of organized crime. Mafias and cartels only have to get to a few people to cement their position, and this is made easier by a dearth of campaign finance, allowing them to step in to fund their interests.
Where corruption exists, a decline in legitimacy follows. Private benefit, beyond that which is enjoyed as a result of a general increase in the public weal, cannot co-exist with a fully genuine concern for one’s constituents.
V. The Problem of Boundaries
Locals do not weigh the interests of outsiders, not even their countrymen. This is odd, given that in modern times the nation is generally understood to command more loyalty than one’s town. Alas, local government is where nationalism goes to die!
I mean to construe outsiders as broadly as possible. Those who do not live in the municipality but will come to live there eventually, those who will not; those who presently exist, and those who make up future generations of residents. All of these people stand to be affected by the decisions reached by the mayor and their council, but none have representation to speak on their behalf.
This is somewhat disanalogous to a similar argument made about national borders. Our federal government’s decisions can have massive ramifications for residents of other countries, but we do not allow them a vote. Perhaps we should. But there is the important consideration that where a foreign government does not command our loyalty, our countrymen generally do. Many of us envision ourselves as connected to our fellow Canadians, or Filipinos, or Kenyans, etc. in a way we don’t to people on the other side of the world. This means a duty to fellow citizens has one less justificatory hurdle to summit.
The practical effects of this incentive structure, one category of which is the subject of the next problem, are to export the costs of decisions elsewhere whilst capturing as much of the benefit as possible. This is an anti-reciprocity that is all too easy to fall into. Why not stop the transit expansion? We all drive cars. Why not pepper the boundary with wind turbines? We shouldn’t have to look at those.
It’s a double bind—because of their political minority status, this means that not only are young residents being screwed by their own local governments, they’re being screwed by every local government.
VI. The Problem of NIMBY
Local government has different incentives from provincial government has different incentives from federal government has different incentives from global government. This has to do with the scope of its powers and the makeup of its electorates.
One of the most important areas overseen by municipalities is zoning. They set the rules about what can be built on lands within their domain and where it can go. You want zoning to keep areas nice and purpose-built, warding factories and waste management away from houses and shops.
Zoning tends to go further than this, sectioning off high-rise housing from slightly less high-rise housing; single-family housing from shops; and so on. Paired with onerous safety requirements, feigned love for ‘historic’ buildings, and weaponized environmental reviews, zoning is a major contributor to the artificial scarcity of homes and an archenemy of economic efficiency.
This is a subproblem of the problem of boundaries. As Matt Yglesias has written, for a small town to pursue abundance invites specific local costs like traffic and infrastructure strain alongside more global benefits to the housing stock. By simply weighing the interests of residents, the cost-benefit of building is less obvious. Add in the fact that municipalities aren’t weighing those interests, but those of their voters, and it is no surprise that lots of projects get blocked.
The attitudes at fault get called ‘not in my backyard’ or NIMBY, and one common thought is that broadening the backyard—consolidating municipalities—gets around the problem of localizing the costs of development, shifting the incentives in its favour. This would distribute the costs more broadly while reaping the same benefits—the key question here is whether this can be achieved with broader municipalities or if one must pluck planning powers away entirely and give them to somebody else.
VII. ACAB
All councillors are bastards! In that spirit, here are some proposals for change, from most radical to least:
Abolish local government - We deserve more experiments in redistributing power between municipal, provincial, and federal-level governments. We need better evidence for how it goes. In Toronto and various Australian cities, several municipalities were consolidated into larger mega-councils, tasked with setting policy for their wholes. It’s not entirely clear whether such moves benefit NIMBYs or YIMBYs. But, for those who feel such experiments are too risky…
Disempower local government - Higher levels of government better understand how housing plans interact across the economy and lack the same incentives to crush new development. Much of the pain imposed by today’s councils could be mitigated by stripping away zoning powers and keeping most else in place. But, if even that is a bridge too far…
Reform local democracy - Voting is much easier when elections are on-cycle. Putting municipal elections on the same ballot as Congress can more than double turnout. Knowing more about the issues is important too. Each additional local newspaper can significantly increase turnout while simultaneously decreasing the opportunity cost of active knowledge acquisition.
We will be scheduling a hearing to assess the feedback on the environmental impact of this blog post in the comments below. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Another, perhaps, is that political disagreements don’t tend to dissolve amongst the informed. The most informed perspectives are often at odds with each other.
You could add a +D term to represent the unique expressive satisfaction that the political hobbyist earns from voting. This is a constant, since it is not dependent on winning.
With assumptions about voter independence.
Based on the model from Gelman, King, and Boscardin.
Is it cavalier to use an old model like this? I don’t think so. Zach Barnett has a paper pushing back against voting models of this sort. On this view, our first misstep is to reason about the benefit to the voter instead of to society—voters understand that this isn’t a decision about them, but about society’s course. Let’s grant this; accepting it without reservation means multiplying the expected benefit by 340 million. In reality, it’s probably somewhere in between 1 and 340,000,000.
Our other misstep is reasoning about the probability of decisiveness incorrectly. This is tougher. Barnett’s Chances Condition is met if ‘the probability of casting the deciding vote is at least one divided by the number of citizens (p ≥ 1/N)’.
This is based on a technical assumption about the distribution of possible vote shares called partial unimodality. The idea is that the leading candidate’s chance to get 50% of the vote is greater or equal to their chance to get any given <50% share. Their probability profile cannot look like this:
As I understand it, partial unimodality puts a floor on the unlikelihood of a decisive vote. I don’t think I understand the probability at play deeply enough to comment on the strength of the assumptions Barnett makes, but they lead to a much higher probability of decisiveness on average.
Liron and Enoch have a response paper going after this assumption, if you want to get into the weeds of this debate. They point to real election modeling by Nate Silver, for instance, which violates partial unimodality as a rule, not an exception.
To be transparent: if we accept Barnett’s paper wholesale and re-run the described congressional scenario, the expected (social) payout from voting in this case is at least $281,000, an enormously cost-effective intervention.
While it may be a bit mean, I’m using the old as a proxy for ‘older homeowners’. I don’t have numbers on hand, but I suspect older renters could vote closer to the median resident’s interests.