Had a great conversation with my old friend Paul Glastris the other day. Paul is the incredible editor of the Washington Monthly. We discussed my writing a piece on how cities and mayors are the new laboratories of democracy. For a while now, I’ve been saying that in the 1980s and 1990s, the states and the governors were the source of new policy ideas and innovations.
Now it seems like a remarkable class of young mayors — Martin O’Malley in Baltimore, Denver’s John Hickenlooper, San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom, Seattle’s Greg Nickels, and of course Richard M. Daley in Chicago, Michael Bloomberg in New York and now Newark’s Cory Booker — are developing new ideas, innovations and strategies for revitalizaing, developing and governing our cities. Will be thinking about this piece for the next couple of months. Would appreciate any ideas or stories or examples you might have…
August 8th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Is there any sort of literature examining specific policies enacted within these cities. It is probably too soon to expect any type of policy analysis/evaluation of impacts at this point, a compendium of potential policies would be helpful.
August 11th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Some Mayors run their cities, some are the city council chairs. Make sure your research delineates this. You might also want to look at city managers and administrators.
As far as increasing democracy, the place to really look at possible improvement is the composition of legislatures. Is there any relationship between district size and responsiveness. What about the influence of parties? Is a non-partisan legislature “better”? How do you define better? When a single party dominates, does it increase corruption? Can corruption be a good thing for development? Does a strong minority party make government better? What about the question of proportional representation and multi-party democracy? Does it effect turnout? Does it effect development? This again rests on how you define “better”. Is better being electable for the officeholder (running for governor or Congress)? When you talk about “new laboratories” are you talking about experimental structures, such as new ways of electing or appointing the school board? How about funding equity and budget sufficiency? How about the state of the schools – both test scores and physical plant? What about Tony Williams of DC? He certainly got experimental with the school board structure. Of course, if you even mention DC you need to get into the whole lack of representation and local control thing (although the vast majority of local control items are really controlled locally – as much as we democracy advocates complain about Congress they pretty much leave DC alone – Alexandria has a harder time with Richmond than DC with Congress).