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If we are going to have this debate, I'd like to hear about large American cities that have been run exclusively by Republicans --not Democrats-- for the last 50-90 years, and then we can compare corruption levels, crime rates, institutional racism, etc. (It could be a bit like comparing East and West Germany before the fall of the Wall. Or North vs South Korea today. Or not.)

edit: for instance, an article in National Review [1] claims the root of the problem is one particular party's domination of these large cities.

[1] http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417601/riot-plagued-ba...

> I'd like to hear about large American cities that have been run exclusively by Republicans

They don't really exist; the political split in the U.S. is more urban/rural than red state blue state. The big cities in otherwise red Southern states like Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia are thoroughly Democratic (though perhaps in a different flavor than northern Democrats). People that have lived in those states know that's true. People that haven't lived in those states need to travel around the country more.

You can find Republican cities in the U.S., but you'd be looking at medium-to-small cities, depending on where you care to draw the line. And those cities are either fast-growing (newly sizable) or competitive politically. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-stat...

Like I said above, there are bad symptoms in any political monoculture. But the problems seem to present differently in urban and rural areas for whatever reason. There are huge problems in rural areas to be sure, like I listed above. In especially poor rural areas, drug abuse and the poverty trap is on par with any inner city, if not worse, like I mentioned above.

> the party is not thrown out of office

Where I grew up, we had two radically oppositional factions that just happened to wear the same label during national elections.

The number of viable parties isn't always a good measure of political diversity or the capacity for churn in government.

Maybe they're correlated in Baltimore, though, I'm less sure there. City governments have fewer moving parts, so they can get captured by a strong network of insiders and the network can stay in power for decades.

Good point, I found that quite interesting too. He mentions Martin O'Malley as the person responsible in some degree and then follows with this quote:

"And, hey, if he's the Democratic nominee, I’m going to end up voting for him."

So while in the primaries he might vote for someone else, in the general he will vote for the person responsible for a lot of the issues described in the article. which is quite saddening but understandable.

Another problem is progressive taxation in cities with massive wealth inequality. In theory police work for the public, but I think they recognize that it's a small percentage of the public that's actually paying their salaries. And I think that sets the stage for how they treat everyone else.

Let me preface this by saying that I think having a third party oriented towards the interests and desires of people who live in cities would be totally, completely great.

> I don't see the political monoculture mentioned in any analysis about Baltimore, New York, St. Louis, Detroit, etc. These cities have been basically one party rule for fifty years (or more). If the police become too brutal or incentives become perverse, the party is not thrown out of office. If the mayor or council members are shown to be corrupt, the party is not thrown out of office. There's no real accountability.

This is off in a couple of ways. First, in cities where everyone avoids the Republican candidates, the real election is the primary. Or else you just save time and have a nonpartisan election. There are usually a number of points of view represented on the half dozen or so topics that city voters tend to care about.

More importantly, I think: corruption and culpability tends to cut across party lines in city and county government. As much as the two parties are very similar flavors at the state and national level, at the local level the differences just don't matter. You've got an office to fulfill, you've got people you need to work with, you've got corruption, and you are either an insider or an outsider. That is the distinction that matters, not party. People who play the game choose to be insiders because it's the only way you get anywhere. When corruption happens, Democrats and Republicans all get paid, or suffer if they do not conform.

In other words, the traditional party discipline dynamic tends to get replaced by a whole other form of discipline. brownbat mentioned a "network of insiders" below, that's what I'm talking about.

> To some degree, the problem is the two-party system. If the district is liberal (as is the case in Baltimore), there needs to be at least two credible liberal alternatives.

O'Malley was up against six other people in the Democratic primary in Baltimore in 1999. There were a diversity of views represented. The views probably all tended to suck, but I don't think that has as much to do with party organization as you think it does.

This would definitely help. The only way to a multiparty system is non-FPTP voting; one of the preferential schemes like STV.

Local government is often bad in a lot of countries, but one of the things about America is that its sheer size makes it unlikely that the national or state government will take it upon itself to "fix" a broken regional or city government. And if it did it would be objected to on principle.

I think a less controversial step in the right direction is to make it easier for randos to get on the ballot.

There can still be some rules about how many people appear on the ballot for a given election, but in a single party area, it should be possible for a challenger to get on the ballot simply by collecting the second most signatures (and the party should not have any sort of ballot persistence either, they should be on equal footing with the randos).

Part of the point I was trying to make is that a political brand combined with at least two realistic options on the ballot makes the party self-police. I don't see the political checks and balances being as strong if any scandal can just be written off as an isolated incident.

I could be wrong, though.

My point was that I think the primary gives the parties much of their power (and that this has undesirable effects).

A simple alternative would be to only allow people to publicly attest that they believe someone to be a worthwhile candidate (that is, sign a ballot petition, with no limitation on the number of such signatures). There is probably some problem there with minority views getting representation on the ballots, but I guess in the cases where that problem would be egregious the minority representation on the ballot would tend to anyway be irrelevant.

A first pass at the rules for picking from many petitions would be to always take 3, and then to also always take all the petitions that had "similar" numbers of signatures (I haven't thought about what a good test for similarity would be, but it would be something like taking the number of signatures collected by the #3 petitioner and taking all the ballots that were above some floor function of that value (like, nearest multiple of 10, or 1/2 that value, or...).

That way the inside baseball of the majority party doesn't end up being the thing that actually decides the election. Which overlaps with your statement about multiple credible candidates up for election, I'm expanding my thoughts here because it isn't clear to me how your reply relates to what I said (I don't mean that as a slight, just that I don't see the connection clearly).

I don't quite understand this ballot petition mechanism. In the UK, anyone can go on the MP ballot so long as they get ten signatures (in the constituency of roughly 50,000 voters) and put down a £500 deposit which is refunded if you get more than a few percent of the vote.

This rarely matters - FPTP focuses the vote on the big parties - but there have been a few cases where a well-loved local MP has fallen out with his party and got himself elected independently.

What has hugely disrupted politics of Great Britain is the establishment of the devolved governments with non-FPTP voting systems.

In my state ( http://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Pet_Sig_Req_Chart_Popu... ), a partisan candidate would need 100 signatures in an election involving 50,000 constituents. A Non partisan would need 200.

A statewide party can be established by collecting 32,261 signatures (with some rules about how the signatures are distributed).

So I'm basically advocating to discard any advantage that is handed to existing parties and making the signature requirements slightly more dynamic (if someone comes in 3rd in any signature gathering contest, I don't see any reason to exclude them from the ballot).

> In my state ( http://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Pet_Sig_Req_Chart_Popu.... ), a partisan candidate would need 100 signatures in an election involving 50,000 constituents. A Non partisan would need 200.

That's actually a little shocking. I'm not sure I agree with making signature requirements "dynamic" but something obvious as this should certainly be changed. It's a rule only a party official could love.