I feel like I can't contribute much further than Yglesias did,
>Political partisanship is kind of like representative democracy itself—a terrible mess, but clearly superior to the alternatives. After all, we don't need to guess at what representative democracy without political parties would look like. Just examine almost any American city council—be it New York, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, whatever—and you'll see a legislative body that's so overwhelmingly Democratic that partisan politics don't drive outcomes. The result of this isn't a utopia of good government and sound policy, it's an orgy of hyper-localism.
>Political parties are organized, for better and for worse, around clashing visions of what's better for America. The quest for partisan advantage is, among other things, a quest for the opportunity to build a better society. Absent parties you get a situation where instead of a clash of visions of what would be best for the city as a whole, council members give undue preference to strong local interests. In city government, that means NIMBYism. In Congress it would mean endless gobs of the much-derided pork barrelling.
This is all hot air punditry. A 'no party' system is clearly different to a 'one party' system. Most notably because those elected still have the fear of being voted out next year...
Also - do you really think having everyone independent would result in fewer 'clashing visions of whats better'? You are likely to have as many as you do candidates, not 2 that are hardly different.
Because you're only beholden to the people who live in your ward, you only really have the interests of those specific 10-50 thousand people (less in smaller cities, more in larger ones) in mind.
This, it turns out, really harms the capacity for governments to make decisions that make everyone better off on average but might make any given small region of people unhappy (say, by building a powerplant or a garbage dump).
Of course, there are benefits to this kind of representation, and some kind of mix is always desirable - but the gist of it is people are more willing to make regionally-disinterested decisions if their interests are aligned across ideological rather than geographical lines.
"This, it turns out, really harms the capacity for governments to make decisions that make everyone better off on average but might make any given small region of people unhappy (say, by building a powerplant or a garbage dump)."
Can you explain why? I don't understand this. I would have thought that, for example, given a country of 50 districts, and the decision is being made "shall we build this dump in district 1", you'll get 49 voting yes and the representative of district 1 voting no.
But District 1's representative is chair of a committee you need to sweet talk in two months, and is maybe a tie-breaking vote for that other thing you want.
It's a case study of power dynamics inside the city of Aalborg with respect to a specific project and shows the influences of counties, businesses, and political climate on the result.
Not sure why Amazon doesn't seem to have it anymore... :(
I'm not sure that was the best example. If you're talking about NIMBYism, there's generally some sort of veto power or capacity to obstruct involved.
The Congressional equivalent would be earmarks and pork. Not that we don't have quite enough of that already but the argument is that absent larger, more ideological themes and the parties' whips, it would be just about all we would have.
The other argument for this is that the ability to have better control of your immediate community/district is really useful in avoiding or stopping decisions that can destroy or permanently harm those neighborhoods. Local politics reflects really well the kind of struggles localities and communities go through, even if sometimes NIMBY kicks in and leaves everyone worse off.
I'm not sure your example is an especially good one. Better is town meetings, which we are common in New England. While they have desirable features, they have the weakness that a small group that is very interested in a given outcome can dominate a much larger population of individuals who have weaker feelings. (Not a universally bad feature but it makes it easier for activists on a given issue to dominate an agenda.)
>Political partisanship is kind of like representative democracy itself—a terrible mess, but clearly superior to the alternatives. After all, we don't need to guess at what representative democracy without political parties would look like. Just examine almost any American city council—be it New York, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, whatever—and you'll see a legislative body that's so overwhelmingly Democratic that partisan politics don't drive outcomes. The result of this isn't a utopia of good government and sound policy, it's an orgy of hyper-localism.
>Political parties are organized, for better and for worse, around clashing visions of what's better for America. The quest for partisan advantage is, among other things, a quest for the opportunity to build a better society. Absent parties you get a situation where instead of a clash of visions of what would be best for the city as a whole, council members give undue preference to strong local interests. In city government, that means NIMBYism. In Congress it would mean endless gobs of the much-derided pork barrelling.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/11/06/sergei_brin_h...