The much-heralded AI revolution is but the latest in a series of technological revolutions originating from Silicon Valley: the integrated circuit and the personal computer, the Internet and the World Wide Web, smartphones and streaming video, search engines, online commerce, and social networks. These revolutions have made many of their creators immensely wealthy and (as has often been the case with the newly wealthy) eager to flex their muscles and acquire social and political power to match their economic power.

They are a would-be ruling elite, but do they deserve to be? This is not a question of whether or not it is good to have billionaires. There will always be an elite to govern us, the question is rather whether they are a positive force or a negative one. That in turn depends on the values they hold and their effectiveness as rulers.

In his article “The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite”¹ and a subsequent post,² Tanner Greer takes the measure of this would-be elite and finds them wanting. He reads a book advertised as the thoughts of their best and brightest and concludes that it most resembles “a series of TED talks sloppily sewn together,” with ideas that “at no point . . . rise above the intellectual level of the average TikTok reel.”

Greer chastises them for the emptiness at the core of today’s technologists’ view of the world: no guiding moral vision, and a deep reluctance to state what they stand for and what (and who) they stand against: “They demand a pulpit for America’s technologists but never summon the courage to state what gospel they should preach.” He also offers a diagnosis of what they need to be a true and effective elite:

a political coalition to which it owes allegiance and over which it exercises influence; an economic base that provides this class with wealth and unites its members around shared material interests; and finally, a set of institutions, rituals, and social customs that give this class a culture distinct from the country at large. Absent the first two, a leadership class lacks the power to lead; absent the latter two, it lacks the ability to act as a class.

Elites then and now

Greer grounds his criticisms in the history of the US after the Civil War, a war that demonstrated the industrial superiority of the North and bound together as a coherent class those whose efforts were key to creating that superiority. They were the seeds of a “techno-nationalist elite” that went on to make the US the preminent world power and create the modern world we take for granted, a world so different from what came before that in retrospect we can see the year 1870 as the “hinge of human history.”³

Some might complain that the 19th-century techno-nationalist elite had more favorable circumstances in which they lived and worked, starting with the unifying experience of victory in war. In contrast, we have social-media-driven polarization and alienation, ethnic strife, drives to promote one’s own group above others in a pitched battle over a perceived zero-sum future, and looming above it all the threat that the machines will soon assume control and treat us as either pets (at best) or pests (at worst).

But this is to gloss over the challenges faced by 19th-century America and the context within which the new elite had to operate: widening economic inequality, grinding rural poverty and foetid urban slums, recurring panics and depressions, rampant corruption in public life and business, a political compromise that granted the Civil War’s losers carte blanche to recreate an apartheid regime destined to last almost a century, brutal wars with native tribes, violent suppression of labor unrest and anarchist and other violence in response, and a population drowning itself in drink.

Thus present troubles are no excuse for the failure of a would-be elite class to take on the role that many among it think it suited for.

As Greer notes, creating and sustaining the earlier techno-nationist elite was a generational task. Perhaps our present-day technologists think that they cannot afford to take the long view, that the Singularity is just around the corner and the best we can do is shape its contours a bit before it’s too late.

But what if the Singularity is delayed, perhaps indefinitely? What if we are actually looking at a decades-long period of ongoing social, economic, and political disruption in the US and around the world? Then it would be nice if our would-be ruling class put a bit more time and effort into thinking how they might govern and to what ends, and then worked to put those ideas into practice.

This post is my own attempt to provide a guide to doing that—inevitably an inadequate attempt, but an attempt I felt compelled to make after reading Greer. I sometimes write as “we” in what follows, not because I myself am or could be a member of such an elite, but to put myself in others’ places and imagine what I might say and do if I were.

What America stands for

Before we discuss means, what about ends, and the values determining those ends? What does this would-be elite stand for? What is their vision for both the America they want to lead and the technological economy and society they are helping create? And, just as important, what are they against? What are the ideas and attitudes they abjure, and who are the enemies they must overcome?

Let’s start with America. What is it as a nation, and what is its place in the world? My candidate: America is a nation dedicated to the principles of liberal democracy, built on the proposition that adherence to such principles is the key to promoting the well-being of individuals, their families, and the society in which they live, and that participation in that society should in theory be open to anyone willing to live according to its principles.⁴

America’s role in the world is then to serve as an example to other countries of what liberal democracy can be at its best, a supporter of other liberal democracies against the forces that threaten them, and, finally, a place that welcomes as potential citizens anyone in the world who can embody the true spirit of America and become an American not just in form but in mind and deed.⁵

I also believe that the free market system is the system best equipped to promote the ideals of liberal democracy and to provide the robust economic growth required to promote both individual flourishing and the nation’s capability to sustain and defend itself and its people. Technological progress plays a key role in promoting that system and that growth, and thus is key to the fulfillment of the American project. But, as instantiated in America, both technological progress and the free market must ultimately serve the causes of liberal democracy and the well-being of Americans.

What is our moral vision?

What moral vision do we uphold? The techo-nationalist elite of the 19th and early 20th century were nominally united by their common Christianity. However, it is likely impossible for any one religion to provide a universal creed for today’s would-be elite. Beyond the different religions of those in America today and those coming to America as immigrants—Christianity in its various forms, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on—most of that elite is resolutely secular, even atheistic, in outlook. It would seem that our search for a common moral vision is doomed at the starting gate.

However, again, we should not exaggerate the differences between the present and the past. The Christianity of the 19th century industrialists and the Eastern Establishment was less obsessed with matters of the spirit and more concerned with matters of the world. It was to a large degree embodied in an Episcopalian establishment that was an American offshoot of a English state church serving that state’s ruling class, and fulfilled a similar function for the US techno-nationalist elite. Perhaps the most influential gospel among that elite was the “gospel of wealth” as evangelized by Andrew Carnegie:

The highest life is probably to be reached, not by such imitation of the life of Christ as Count Tolstoi gives us, but, while animated by Christ’s spirit, by recognizing the changed conditions of this age, and adopting modes of expressing this spirit suitable to the changed conditions under which we live; still laboring for the good of our fellows, which was the essence of his life and teaching, but laboring in a different manner.⁶

A basic moral code for today’s elite can thus plausibly be constructed as follows:

First, a foundational morality as embodied in multiple religions and among most unreligious, one that (for example) sees murder, rape, theft, and fraud as universally bad.

Next, a moral code that aligns with the ideals of liberal democracy: respecting the dignity of each individual as a fellow citizen, promoting the rule of law, and upholding the interests of individuals and families, especially when those come into conflict with those of powerful corporate and state bodies. This rules out supposed exceptions to the base moral code that can be found in clan-based societies and autocracies, for example, honor killings and extra-judicial killings of dissidents and others respectively.

Finally, moral obligations that bind those who enjoy the success afforded by their native talents and their contingent luck, and who are placed in a position to directly or indirectly rule over others. This is the realm of noblesse oblige, of recognizing that what one has achieved is to a large degree determined by factors beyond one’s control, and that that in turn should motivate one to help those less fortunate in their circumstances.

Enemies without and within

If we take as our touchstones liberal democracy and technological advances in support of liberal democracy, who are our enemies?

First are the enemies of liberal democracy: autocracies of various stripes and groups that reject the rule of law in favor of the “rule of the clan.”⁷

Next are those within liberal democracies who are the enemies of technological advances in support of liberal democracy: those who believe that protecting their current status (e.g., as “real Americans”) is more important than economic growth and technological advances, and those who believe that economic growth and technological advances are pernicious and must be sacrificed in the name of equity, “saving the planet,” and other causes.

Finally there is a heresy of liberalism itself that we must suppress: a radical libertarianism that elevates the “sovereign individual” above all else, and disclaims all obligations to one’s fellow members of society beyond the bare minimum of “nonagression.”

Coalition building for techno-nationalists

Having outlined ends, we now turn to means. Of the three elements Greer sees as crucial to creating a techno-nationalist elite, the second is most easily satisfied: “an economic base that provides this class with wealth and unites its members around shared material interests.” That base consists of the public technology companies whose valuations together dominate the US stock market, the private technology companies with equally lofty valuations, and the horde of new startups specializing in bits or (increasingly) atoms that hope to join them. Money is the least of problems for our would-be elite, but money cannot substitute for the other factors Greer identifies.

Let’s turn therefore to the first element: “a political coalition to which [the elite] owes allegiance and over which it exercises influence.” Here our would-be elite’s efforts have been halting at best and ham-fisted failures at worst. (See for example Elon Musk’s thus-far-empty threat to create the “America Party.”) How might they do better?

Greer discusses at length the role that the post-Civil War Republican party served as a political home for 19th and early 20th-century industrialists. Might one of our two major parties serve the same function today?

Unfortunately, both parties are dominated in their different ways by the enemies of technological progress I identified above, those who would sacrifice economic growth on the altars of nativism and equity respectively. As Greer has previously written, the direction of the Republican Party is to a large degree determined by whoever heads it,⁸ and thus support for a techno-nationalist program will depend in large part on the personal whims of GOP leaders.

As Greer also has written, the Democratic Party is driven more by interest groups and less by its leaders’ personal whims. However, despite pundits promoting “abundance,” there is as yet no strong Democratic faction committed to that cause; it certainly doesn’t seem to be popular among younger staffers and grass-roots activists, most of whom are more anti-capitalist in outlook and prioritize considerations of equity over economic growth.

A techno-nationalist “Prosperity Party”?

Where does that leave us? It seems that any successful techno-nationalist coalition must have an effective political party at its core. As the political scientist Lee Drutman notes, “Political parties aggregate citizen and group preferences, and fuse those interests into a consistent long-term program. Without this partisan brokering function, independent actors would float around the political space chaotically.”⁹ This applies no matter how rich and influential these independent actors are.

But the conventional approach to starting a third party is very difficult, given the structural and other impediments to its success—again no matter how rich and influential its backers might be.

Drutman proposes to address this issue through the promotion of “fusion voting,” that is, allowing a given candidate be nominated by two different parties and appear on the ballot under both their names. Their votes would be tallied separately for both parties, and then “fused” to give their final vote total.¹⁰

Thus we can imagine a hypothetical “Prosperity Party,” dedicated to promoting eeconomic growth and technological advances for the benefit of all Americans. It would recruit like-minded Democratic or Republican candidates to also run under its own banner, provide them financial and other support, and see its vote totals reported alongside those of the two major parties.

Unfortunately, there’s a fly in the ointment: Fusion voting as described was quite common in the United States before and during the period in which Greer’s techno-nationalist elite was ascendant. However since that period the two major parties have cooperated to eliminate any such threat to their hegemony by passing legislation that effectively outlaws this practice in all but two states (New York and Connecticut).¹¹

Drutman sees potential legal avenues to overturning these prohibitions, perhaps based on their violating constitutional rights to free association. I doubt this will be a successful strategy; judges owe their positions to the major parties that nominate them, and I predict that instead courts at all levels will maintain the status quo and defer this question to legislators.

A techno-nationalist “Prosperity Society”?

What then to do? There is certainly no obstacle to this hypothesized Prosperity Party running candidates in states like New York where fusion voting is still legal, or in other states like California where it is permitted in special cases like US presidental elections.

But an effective party needs an effective organization, hence a second element of building a techno-nationalist coalition: build a capacity for policy and organizational work outside the two-party structure. Greer has complained about the lack of “nuts-and-bolts policy expertise“ among conservative activists.¹² Such expertise, and the related expertise on how to effectively govern, are exactly what an effective elite needs. This expertise could be applied within the two major parties as well as in support of a new Prosperity Party.

Such an organization would be the techno-nationalist equivalent of an organization like the Federalist Society, except focused on the executive and legislative branches as opposed to (just) the judicial branch. This “Prosperity Society” would recruit and support techno-nationalist activists, policy wonks, potential bureaucrats and political appointees, and (last but not least) potential political candidates who might win Prosperity Party endorsements. If elected, they could then work to roll back prohibitions against fusion voting, so that they would be able to formally run under the Prosperity Party banner while still maintaining affiliations with one of the two major party banners.

A techno-nationalist “prosperity agenda”?

Of course, party organizations and policy shops are useless unless a techno-nationalist agenda can win support from a majority of voters. I suspect there are at least three components to a potentially winning agenda:

• Promoting affordability, especially for housing and healthcare. The split here will likely be between young people and old people, with the latter’s economic well-being tied to a large degree to high home values and generous healthcare subsidies. A Prosperity Party should side with the young.

• Putting in place an immigration policy that promotes economic growth and the effective assimilation of new immigrations into American culture. The Prosperity Party should side with the majority of Americans who are overall positive toward immigration and immigrants.

• Ensuring that the prosperity resulting from technological advances (AI or otherwise) is widely shared. Note that this does not mean trying to enforce economic equality. In fact, it’s quite likely that technology-driven economic growth will increase economic inequality, not decrease it. The goal is rather that all Americans have the means to live lives of dignity and worth, free from precarity, and that through the liberal democratic system they have some reasonable influence over the context in which technological advances occur, as opposed to being treated as mere speed bumps on the road to the future.

Others have written on the above topics at length, so I’ll forgo any further comment on them.

Institutions for techno-nationalists

I now turn to Tanner Greer’s final prescription for creating a techno-nationalist elite: “a set of institutions, rituals, and social customs that give this class a culture distinct from the country at large.” Ideally such institutions would nurture and support prospective members of a new techno-nationalist elite from childhood to adulthood, and from their early careers to the height of their power.

K-12 education for a techno-nationalist elite

Let’s start with childhood. Greer notes the important role played by private boarding schools as “national preparatory academies for the sons of the industrial elite.” Many of these schools still exist and have become a feeder system for Harvard and other elite colleges and universities.

For various reasons I consider it unlikely that these schools will play a similar role for a 21st century techno-nationalist elite. I consider it much more likely that new entrants will evolve to fill this particular ecological niche. As it happens, there are candidates near to hand, namely the growing ecosystem of high-end private schools being established under the Alpha School brand, as well as others modeled on Alpha School principles and licensing its associated TimeBack suite of educational software.¹³

The Alpha School model seems almost tailor-made for incubating a techno-nationalist elite: it combines accelerated academics in the morning (enabled by advanced educational applications developed in accordance with established principles of learning science) with guided instruction in life skills and project-based learning in the afternoon. It’s a veritable factory for equipping young people with advanced leveragable skills (including STEM skills), socializing them in a technology-friendly environment, and giving them a sense of being part of a “culture distinct from the country at large.”

Such a system is not for everyone. As a review of Alpha School notes, upper and upper-middle-class parents in Austin, Texas (the location of the original Alpha School) will likely continue to send their children to traditional exclusive private schools like those Greer mentions: “That is where the elite are sending their kids, why wouldn’t you want your kids in the same place?”¹⁴

The reviewer (later revealed to be Edward Nevraumont) goes on to ask “So who is going to Alpha?” and answers: “Mostly elite non-conformists,” with Alpha School parents comprising a mix of tech employees moving to Austin (e.g., from the San Francisco Bay area), Indian immigrants in tech or small business, and “non-conformist ’new media’ personalities,” typically specializing in tech-related topics.

Nevraumont speculates that “[Alpha School] will need to find a way to break through that niche into the mainstream if they want to truly transform education more broadly.” But whether or not that happens, I think it’s very possible that Alpha School and its imitators could form a parallel private school ecosystem serving a would-be techno-nationalist elite who no longer look to traditional private schools as a path to elite status.

University for a techno-nationalist elite

Assuming that Alpha School or something like it becomes the default for the would-be techno-nationalist elite, what would they do for post-secondary education? In other words, what institution (if any) would be for them what Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League were for the 19th and 20th century techno-nationalist elite?

It’s tempting to propose radical solutions to this problem. For example, perhaps these students will forgo entirely a traditional college or university experience, and instead apply for programs like the Thiel Fellowship that seek to divert talented individuals from university into doing research or creating startups. Or perhaps they’ll avail themselves of specialized educational opportunities like short-term “boot camps” that aim to prepare students to enter the workforce. (One such program, Gauntlet AI, is the source of a large fraction of the Alpha School developers.)

Another possibility is that they will in fact attend universities and colleges, but universities and colleges that (like St. Johns College) emphasize the classic works of Western civilization and (like the University of Austin) aim to act as bastions of free thought.

I think the likelier outcome is that the children of any future techno-nationalist elite will matriculate at an institution that has existed for some time now, that already enjoys an reputation as a focal point for technogy-minded folks, that is located in an area already known for its technology industries, and that is large enough to absorb a good fraction of the graduates of a nationwide network of Alpha Schools and their equivalents.

The most obvious candidate for this role is Stanford University. In this regard, note that the daughters of Joe Liemandt, the billionaire funder of Alpha School, opted for Stanford, and I would not surprised to learn that it is and will be the preferred destination for other Alpha School graduates as well. Having established a reputation as “the Harvard of the West,” Stanford would then become (more than it already is) the Harvard of the 21st century techno-nationalist elite.

Adult institutions for a techno-nationalist elite

Once the children of a new techno-nationalist elite enter the adult world, what “institutions, rituals, and social customs” would continue to bind them together as a unified class? Tanner Greer briefly mentions the Union League Clubs established in New York City and elsewhere, and the marriages that tied elite families to each other.

But Greer omits mention of one of the most important institutions for the late 19th and early 20th century American techno-nationalist elite, namely the Episcopal Church:

This was . . . an age in which, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Episcopal Church enjoyed a social cachet above virtually all other religious groups . . . . The names of fashionable families who were already Episcopalian, like the Morgans, or those, like the Fricks, who now became so, goes on interminably: Aldrich, Astor, Biddle, Booth, Brown, Du Pont, Firestone, Ford, Gardner, Mellon, Morgan, Procter, Taft, Vanderbilt, Whitney.¹⁵

The list includes many of the most prominent and powerful financiers and industrialists of the time. J. P. Morgan in particular was such a devout Episcopalian that he regularly attended church conventions as a delegate and was appointed to a committee charged with revising the Book of Common Prayer.¹⁶

It’s thus worth looking at the functions that the Episcopal Church served for this previous techno-nationalist elite, to determine whether and what kinds of institutions (religious or secular) might serve similar functions for a future elite.

The first was to bless its adherents as an elect, not only religious (as the more Calvinist doctrines of Episcopalianism would imply) but also social and cultural, an elect whose members would serve as models for others to admire and emulate. The essential idea was that “there was an institutionalized set of touchstones of belief, behavior, and taste that were embodied in the proper sort of individuals and could serve as a beacon for a nation in profound social transition.”¹⁷ In the cultural sphere this led to the establishment of many of the great American art and other museums, as well as support of high culture in general.

At the same time, this elect was encouraged by church leaders to look within and become conscious of their own good fortune and their consequent obligation to assist those less fortunate. In the social sphere this led to the establishment of outreach programs to the poor, “institutional churches” that provided secular services on church grounds, settlement houses, and related projects in the spirit of the “Social Gospel.”¹⁸

Other aspects of the Episcopal Church worth noting:

• Membership in its establishment was restricted but also open to some degree. Being Anglo-Saxon was almost a prerequisite, as was having a certain degree of wealth—many churches even had a system of pew-rents that restricted the relatively impecunious to the upper galleries. However, within those constraints it was possible for newcomers to join the church (many arriving from Congregationalism, the Quakers, and Unitarianism), serve the church is various ways as a layperson, become accepted into church society, and gain contacts that would prove valuable in society at large.

• Churches and their services provided loci in space and time where the elite could meet on a regular basis (at least every week for diligent parishioners), work together in church activities on a relatively equal basis (e.g., as vestrymen), and build ties between families that might later be reinforced by marriages.

• Episcopalians were key to promoting the growth of the “St. Grottlesex“ network of exclusive private schools that Greer discusses as being established to perpetuate the 19th century techno-nationalist elite. Of the specific schools that Greer names, the majority were founded, funded, or led by Episcopalians; it was very common for the headmasters of these schools to be Episcopal priests.¹⁹

Are there present-day institutions that could be to our would-be techno-nationalist elite what the Episcopal Church was to that past elite? Or possible new institutions that could evolve to fill that role?

Here I must plead ignorance. While I’ve worked for Silicon Valley companies almost my entire career, my life has been lived at a remove from the Valley itself, not to mention San Francisco proper. I have even less visibility into what might be going on in Austin, Texas, El Segundo, California, or other places that might rival the Bay area as a technology hub.

So I don‘t know what public or private organizations or events are currently patronized by our would-be elite, or what might attract their attention in future. However, I’m mildly skeptical that the next Episcopal Church will in fact be a church. It’s possible that there may be a revival in religious affiliation and practice (for example, see the recent growth in interest in Catholicism), but I find it difficult to see any particular faith or denomination unifying and binding a future techno-nationalist elite.

Prospects for (re)creating a techno-nationalist elite

Tanner Greer explored the history of the last American techno-nationalist elite, and I’ve speculated about what might be needed to create a new elite for the 21st century. But how likely is that to occur?

Rather than engage in detailed speculation, I’ll consider a counterfactual. Greer highlights the experience of Union victory in the US Civil War as the crucible for the creation of the 19th century techno-nationalist elite. But suppose the Confederacy had instead defeated the Union militarily, especially early on, seized Washington and captured and executed Lincoln and most of his cabinet, and been able to force terms of surrender on the remaining Union leaders? Or what if after the fall of Fort Sumter the North had simply acquiesced to the secession of the South?

What of the techno-nationalist elite then? In a North marked by defeat or retreat, no doubt with continuing internal conflicts over slavery and recriminations over the war’s outcome, would a self-consciously patriotic and nationalist elite have formed? Or would the financiers and industrialists of the post-war North have remained divided, some making accomodations with slave power and others resisting as best they could?

If the formation of a new techno-nationalist elite depends on America facing an existential threat and emerging victorious, then I have to confess I’m skeptical as to the possibility, and incline more to something like the counterfactual scenario above: a technology industry whose leaders are divided amongst themselves, some genuinely patriotic and committed to liberal democracy (but relatively ineffectual in their promotion of it) and others willing to make accomodations with illiberalism (but in practice being dispensable junior partners of the actual ruling elite).

Here ends my thoughts and speculations. When I originally read Tanner Greer’s article and posted an X thread about it, I expressed a hope that “Tanner Greer expands on this analysis in future articles, including offering advice tailored to the present day.“²⁰ The above is my own contribution to providing “advice tailored to the present day,” until such time as we’re privileged to read a better treatment from the man himself.

What does it mean to be an American? Are some people inherently more “American” than others? And, if so, what if anything does that imply?

[UPDATE 2024-09-27: I revised the final paragraphs of the post and expanded them into a new section “clan and country,” after thinking about a point I had not previously considered.]

Although I’m a life-long registered Democrat and would be considered “liberal” by most or even “leftist” by some, I make it a regular practice to read people who have different political beliefs than myself and who have shown themselves to be more than mere ideologues and political strivers. One of those is Tanner Greer, the (relatively) young conservative intellectual who writes at The Scholars Stage; I’m subscribed to his Patreon and follow him on X (fka Twitter).

Thus when Greer gave a positive recommendation to an opinion piece by Joshua Treviño, “America as Place and People: Understanding J.D. Vance on history and nation,” I thought it worth checking out, and after reading it worth writing in response.

Treviño urges us to watch or read Vance’s speech to the Republican National Convention. I’m sorry, but I’ll take a pass on that. Political speeches are in their essences sales pitches, and having worked in sales groups most of my life I have no desire to watch or read sales pitches when I’m off work, even those that pander to my own political views. What really matters is the end product that the American people would end up buying, i.e., what actions Vance would support Donald Trump in taking were they to win office.

But Treviño’s piece is worth reading because it functions in the same way as, say, a Gartner report does in the industry space I work in: it seeks to provide some intellectual substance behind the sales pitch and to bend the mind of the “prospect” in a certain direction, to think of the problems at hand in one way (one favorable to Vance, Trump, and others) rather than another.

Not a “propositional nation”

So, what is Treviño’s “pitch behind the pitch,” as it were? He takes as his starting point a quote from Vance’s speech, the core of which is this: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” Treviño then contrasts that with “propositionalism,” that the essence of the U.S. is in certain ideas—e.g., “all men are created equal,” “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” etc.—that exist independent of ancestry and ethnicity and could in principle be adopted by anyone and take root anywhere.

In Treviño’s view, prepositionalism “eradicated the enduring Western understanding of what a nation or a polity actually is,” goes against “millennia of tradition and political thought,” and has various ill consequences, most notably including the acceptance of high levels of illegal immigration and the “demand that the deeply rooted peoples of the land adapt themselves to the newcomers, but never vice versa.”

Treviño’s position is rather that America arose in a particular historical context: “the Christianization of England, the Protestant Reformation, the Elizabethan settlement, the English Civil War, King Philip’s War, the Glorious Revolution, Locke, and so on.” That in turn implies that although it is certainly possible for anyone to become an American, some Americans are more closely associated with that historical context than others, and are thus “more-normatively American, and more fully constitutive of America” than others. Therefore “the community and the history that made the America to which the immigrants arrive is the standard—and deserves a positive defense.”

Treviño protests against those who would immediately leap to interpret this argument as justifying bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment. So rather than jumping directly to evaluating the good and bad in this line of argument, and arguing points in opposition to it, I’d rather start by talking about mathematics.

A mathematical immigrant

Although mathematics is often thought to exist independently of mathematicians themselves, in fact modern mathematics as we know it (from the Renaissance on) arose in a particular historical context and in a particular set of Western European nations. Whether it could have arisen elsewhere in the same form is an open question, but in practice it did not.

That history privileged not only surface aspects like mathematical notation but also particular ways of doing mathematics and beliefs about which mathematical questions were considered most important. That history also manifested itself not only in distinct national differences (it was in no way an oxymoron to speak of “French mathematics” versus “German mathematics”) but also in families in which multiple generations were mathematicians. Where no actual family ties existed, mathematicans constructed fictive families of a sort, in which one mathematician taught others who then went on to teach others still, so that each mathematician could look backward to their own line of mathematical “ancestors.”

Therefore, “as a purely objective matter” it would be true that (say) a third-generation Bernoulli would be more “more-normatively [a mathematician], and more fully constitutive of [mathematics]” than (say) a poor Indian of humble origins working as an accounting clerk. Then the question might arise, what should be done if such a person were to come knocking at the door of European mathematics asking to be let in?

Those familiar with the history of mathematics will recognize this as the story of Srinivasa Ramunajan, a prodigy who sought to bring his work to the attention of mathematicians in England. Some shut the door against him, including E. W. Hobson and H. F. Baker, but eventually J. E. Littlewood and G. H. Hardy let him in, to their ultimate benefit.

But this was not a one-way affair. While receiving the fruits of Ramanujan’s genius, at the same time Hardy and Littlewood indoctrinated him in the “norms” of European mathematics, including in particular what constituted a valid proof of a result and what did not. They were not always successful in this, but they made the effort and considered it important to do so, because “the community and the history” that made the European mathematical tradition was “the standard.” For those rooted in that tradition and Ramanujan to mutually benefit from their interactions, Ramanujan needed to adapt to the ways of the tradition’s “natives” as much or more than they needed to adapt to Ramanujan.

Immigration policy as if assimilation mattered

Coming back from European mathematics to American politics, we can immediately derive some reasonable implications for immigration policy:

First, that some sort of gatekeeping is necessary, but it should be combined with openness to those who seek to come and could enrich the native tradition. Hobson and Baker were not wrong to dismiss someone who could well have been simply a mathematical crank, but at the same time it was and is a blessing to mathematics that Hardy and Littlewood were willing to take a chance on Ramanujan.

Second, as Anton Ego might have said, not everyone can be a good American, but a good American can come from anywhere. Thus immigration policy and indeed American society at large should self-consciously select for immigrants who would make good Americans, not by ethnicity or country of origin but based on more personal characteristics: their willingness to abandon “clannishness“ in favor of a law-based liberal order, personalities that put them in the higher percentiles of traits we associate with stereotypical Americans, and a level of relaxed tolerance sufficient to enable them to coexist with their neighbors wherever their American journey might take them, whether that be New York City, Salt Lake City, or somewhere that’s not a city at all.¹

This selection process could occur either before or after immigrants arrive. There is nothing wrong with encouraging certain types of people to immigrate as opposed to others. And if an immigrant is not willing or able to conform to American social norms, there’s nothing wrong with encouraging them to voluntarily return to their home country, and assisting them in so doing. But if they like America and fit in to American society, then we should endeavor to give them a sure and certain path to full citizenship.

Immigration policy in the time of Trump

However, having floated an alternative vision for immigration policy, I presume that the chances of anything like this being implemented are slim to none, given the need for at least partial GOP buy-in. Attempts to find a bipartisan consensus on border security appear to have been blocked by Donald Trump’s decision—and Mike Johnson’s acquiescence in that decision—to inflict upon the nation several more months of “chaos at the border” in the hopes that it would improve his election chances.

Then there’s the proposal to keep non-citizens from voting, presumably while continuing to count them for purposes of Congressional reapportionment, thus depriving one group of political power in order to increase the political power of others. It’s a strategy not unknown in American history, here more effective because it would count the disenfranchised at their full numbers rather than at just a fraction.

As for the possibility that the Republican party might find a more nuanced approach to immigration policy based on a rejection of propositionalism and the valoration of a “shared history and common future,” in the end I don’t think it matters what Treviño thinks, or even what J. D. Vance thinks. As Tanner Greer points out in another article (riffing off Jo Freeman), the Republican party is controlled by whoever happens to be its leader, and right now that leader is Donald Trump. Vance will adapt to Trumpism (indeed he already has) and not vice versa. And thus Vance’s wife Usha, whose parents arrived here from India, got to make her speech at the Republican national convention confronted by a sea of RNC-printed and -distributed signs reading (in all caps) “mass deportation now.”

If not a “propositional nation,” then what?

If America is not to be a “propositional nation,” what are the alternatives?

One possible left-wing response is to view those propositions as nothing more than empty promises, and the history of the US as nothing more than a history of genocide, oppression, and imperialism. One possible right-wing response is to reimagine America as an ethnostate in which all Americans are “real,” but some are more “real” than others.² We’d then have to go to Ancestry.com to see who trumps whom.

Both these responses are lacking. The left-wing response leads some to excuse similar or worse genocide, oppression, and imperialism as practiced by foreign dictators, as long as those dictators present themselves as anti-American. The right-wing response puts new Americans in a permanently inferior position relative to the “natives,” like people who move to an insular small town, live there for most of their lives, and still are regarded as “newcomers” not truly accepted into small town society.

Moreover, both these responses devalue what it means to be an American, and destroy that sense of American exceptionalism on which we have always prided ourselves. If America is just an ethnostate, with an in-group of “natives” and an out-group of “others,” what distinguishes America from China, Japan, Korea (North or South), or any other country organized around blood, not beliefs?

And why would Silvestre Herrera, the Medal of Honor winner lauded by Treviño, have charged so boldly into a hail of machine gun fire if he did not believe that America was as much in him, and he in America, as anyone who could boast of “a six-generation lineage on the western-Appalachian slope”? As Abraham Lincoln said regarding Blacks enlisting in the Union Army, “Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive.” Some may dismiss the propositions with which America was birthed and preserved, and others sneer at the “magic dirt” that supposedly can turn Them into Us. But the promise that all men are created equal, and the extension of that promise to those formerly excluded from it, have proved to be among the strongest motives of all.

What makes a nation

If not blood, what makes a nation a nation, and its citizens members of it? Shared life experiences both small (e.g., typical school life) and large (e.g., wars, political, social, and economic upheavals, etc.). In-group markers like language and accent, religion, style of dress, food preferences, and so on. Particular personality traits treated as desired national norms. And last but not least, acceptance of a particular national narrative (“stories nations tell themselves”) and one’s participation in it.

New immigrants lack the first two, but they can certainly act like Americans, and they can accept and take part in the story of America, so that the problems of America become their problems to deal with, and the triumphs of America victories in which they can take pride. Those born to immigrants in the US, or who have come to the US as young children, have all four: they have shared their life experiences in school, play, and elsewhere with their peers, and from their peers they have acquired accents, tastes, and attitudes similar or identical to those of other Americans their own age. And of course they have literally been schooled in American history and the propositions associated with it. It is an insult to them to look at, say, a picture of American winners of an international mathematics competition and (as one person did on X) refer to them as “Team China USA.” They are Team USA, period.

Clan and country

However, perhaps I’m doing Treviño an injustice. Let’s look more closely at his argument as it might apply to Treviño’s own Chinese-born son, who “bears the name and the inheritance of one of the original Americans.” If one were a true ethnonationalist then Treviño’s statement would seem to make no sense: Presuming his son was adopted, how could he be the rightful heir to “the name and the inheritance of one of the original Americans”? A true ethnonationalist could and presumably would argue that Treviño’s son has no right to that name, that his bearing it is simply a form of “stolen valor.” By those lights his true inheritance is instead that of the Wangs and the Zhangs.

How to reconcile this? One way, and perhaps the way that Treviño intended, is to consider lineage not as determined (solely) by genetic descent, but (also) by the transmission of culture from parents to children, who then pass it down to their children in turn, and so on down through time. The deeds of ancestors are honored by their descendants, and their precepts instruct and inspire them.

From this point of view, what matters is not the circumstances of Treviño’s son’s birth but the consequences of his upbringing: By growing up in a family that can trace its roots (biological and cultural alike) to the earliest days of America, he is now considered a full member of that family—a social fact, if not a biological one. As such he can presumably be considered “more-normatively American, and more fully constitutive of America” than, say, a hypothetical twin brother who was born at the same time and place, and arrived in America at the same time, but who grew up within their own (Chinese immigrant) family.

This is certainly a more palatable argument than one that relies solely on ethnicity as the mark of a “real American.” There are also positive aspects to emphasizing the importance of families and their traditions. But I still have a problem with the idea of elevating Treviño’s son over his hypothetical non-adopted twin when it comes to measuring “American-ness,” when both grew up in the same American cultural milieu and would both almost certainly appear equally “American” to those ignorant of their different family situations.

I also think this argument risks returning us at least partially to the days when one’s membership in and loyalty to one’s extended family—in other words, one’s clan—was considered far more important than one’s membership in and loyalty to the nation of which one’s clan was a part. We spent several hundred years liberating ourselves from the “rule of the clan,” and I for one do not wish to go back to it.

I would much rather echo the sentiment of the man who quoted this letter from a constituent:

Since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it’s fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

A little while ago I wrote about the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers (now streaming on Netflix), and speculated on its impact on China. It turns out that its more immediate impact was on Taiwan itself, as the ruling Democratic Progressive Party finds itself embroiled in an ongoing scandal that echoes a #MeToo subplot in Wave Makers. (HT to James Turnbull for alerting me to this.)

When the show was originally released, President Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP tweeted, “I hope you all enjoy this peek into the workings of Taiwan’s democracy.” I guess she’s not enjoying it as much right now.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost. Given the ongoing discourse about China and Taiwan, I thought it was worth publishing it on my own site. I’m a total newbie when it comes to China, Taiwan, and international relations, so consider this as published for amusement purposes only.]

A while back I commented on what I thought was a deliberate Taiwan government strategy to build “soft power” by funding films and TV series highlighting LGBTQ stories. Now comes an even more explicitly political TV series out of Taiwan, one that was publicly endorsed by Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen.

Wave Makers is an eight-episode Netflix series focusing on the press and PR team (the “wave makers” of the title) working on a (fictional) Taiwanese presidential campaign. In a way it’s a Taiwanese equivalent of US shows like The West Wing and House of Cards, and like those shows is slanted and unrealistic in various ways both large and small. However, unlike the US, Taiwan faces an existential threat, and that makes Wave Makers more interesting—and more vital—than any US political drama might be. What follows is my (mostly) spoiler-free analysis of the show and its significance.

The players and the game

The story of Wave Makers features multiple generations and diversity in genders. The central character is Weng Wen-fang, a lesbian whose previous run for office ended in failure, and who now serves as the chief spokesperson for the (fictional) Justice Party. Her boss is Chen Chia-ching, whose long hours running the campaign threaten to estrange him from his wife and child.

Weng and Chen work in support of the presidential run of Lin Yueh-chen, who tries to balance her personal convictions with political expediency. Opposing her is the incumbent president of the (also fictional) Democracy and Peace Party, along with her newly-selected running mate Chao Chang-tse, who enlists his wife and daughter to help him present the image of a perfect political family.

Finally, the rising generation is represented by Chang Ya-ching, an aide to Weng whose past and present actions put her at the center of the evolving plot; Chao Jung-chih, the daughter of Chao Chang-tse, who comes to doubt her father’s integrity; and Tsai Yi-an and his fellow Justice Party campaign workers, who struggle to justify to their university friends their turn from student protests to conventional politics.

The series provides an idealized but informative look at what goes into running a political campaign in an always-online society, where even minor events (like a candidate being bitten by a supporter’s dog) require an “all hands on deck” effort by the PR team to keep the narrative from going in a unwanted direction. The Justice Party campaign team tries to find issues that will resonate with voters, criticizing the incumbent administration’s positions on the environment and playing up Lin’s support of new immigrants to Taiwan. However, as often happens in both fiction and real life, other issues get shoved off the stage as sex scandals both imagined and real seize the attention of the media and the general public.

All of that falls away, though, in the second half of the last episode: the campaign heads into its final days in a flurry of rallies and candidate appearances, election day arrives, and the various characters pause to cast their “sacred votes”—an act more significant in a society that only two generations ago was a one-party state under martial law—all ending in the counting of votes, the euphoria of the winners, and the despondency of the losers.

The existential question

For all of the political topics dramatized by Wave Makers, there is one that is not: the relationship between Taiwan and China. Creating a show directly addressing “cross-strait relations” from a Taiwanese perspective would no doubt put the kibosh on any hopes that Netflix might have of being allowed access to China, as well as risk derailing the careers of anyone in the cast or crew whose livelihoods are dependent on access to the Chinese market.

But this omission can also be viewed as a strength. In a review of the series, Chieh-Ting Yeh points out that “[the show] may actually be what the Taiwanese people prefer their politics to look like. . . . Rival politicians can debate immigration and environmental policies, fend off student protesters, and even dig up each others’ scandals without worrying about what anyone in Beijing or Washington says.” From this point of view, Wave Makers is a portrait of what Taiwan could be if it were not perpetually “amid tensions.”

But for those Chinese who are well-connected (in an Internet sense), and thus able to view the series via clandestine means, it can also be thought of as a vision of what China could be if it too were not “amid tensions” driven by the CCP and its leader. Based on reactions that have dribbled out, there are at least a few people in China who would prefer participating in a political system that offers real alternatives for the development of the country and its people, instead of spending their days being drilled on the fine points of “Xi Jinping Thought.”

In his essay “Politics,” Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted the early US politician Fisher Ames as saying that “a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water.”¹ Wave Makers is a portrait of life on that raft. Political parties may suffer reverses and losses, but (as a character says in one of the final scenes), “There’s always next time.”

On the other hand, in the last years of the twentieth century the Soviet Union struck on a rock and went to the bottom. The rulers of China are haunted by this event, which they ascribe to the growth of factions within the ruling party and the influence of “foreign” ideology. In a document produced for the indoctrination of party cadres, one can almost smell the fear that the ideological influence of “hostile forces” will lead to a “color revolution,” and that China (or, more correctly, the rule of the CCP) “will inevitably disintegrate like a sheet of loose sand.”

To preserve itself, the CCP must suppress not only actual opposition, but any ideas that might inspire such opposition: “Once the defensive line in thought has been breached it is difficult for other defensive lines to hold. In the realm of ideological conflict, we have no way to compromise and no place to retreat to. We must obtain total victory.” Thus the fear of “hot topics on the Internet” and the perceived need for the CCP to “increase the vigor of public opinion control.”

Thus also the importance to the CCP of “reunification”: beyond any historical justifications, expansionist ambitions, or desires to avenge the “century of humiliation,” the very existence of a democratic Taiwan is an existential threat to China’s rulers. Thus the increasing likelihood that China will move against Taiwan—if not through an actual invasion then through a “death by a thousand cuts” in which China incrementally destroys Taiwanese independence by means just short of outright war.

Thus, finally, two possible futures: one in which the ideas represented in Wave Makers inspire “counter-elites” within or without the CCP to exploit new waves of popular discontent and break the party’s monopoly on power, and one in which Wave Makers, like the films of pre-1997 Hong Kong, serves as a cinematic reminder of a democratic society that was, but is no more.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-06-10 12:17

The comments from people in mainland China about that show are very interesting.

Bad governments rely on a constant battle against accountability and epistemology, increasingly resulting in brittleness and information closure that cripples their ability to respond to new situations, leading to self defeat. My impression is that the CCP has a higher degree of ability to respond to new situations with adjustments than, say, the USSR and certainly current Russia, but its difficult to ascertain exactly where they land since their system involves some technocratic and some semidemocratic components. Its easy to see that modern Russia is too brittle and irrational, guaranteeing failure, but one wonders how long governments with less extreme structural flaws can rule.

https://warontherocks.com/2023/05/xi-jinpings-worst-nightmare-a-potemkin-peoples-liberation-army/ Related, good article

maddie (@ninecoffees) - 2024-02-27 13:39

Thank you so much for writing this

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

Recently @shel promoted the idea of paying attention to your local library board. Her comments can be extended to cover all things local.

There are always exceptions, but to a first approximation every minute you spend reading or (especially) tweeting about national politics is probably a bad use of your time, and every dollar you spend contributing to national political campaigns (or to political campaigns in other states) is probably a bad use of your money. Even if you “live on the Internet,” what happens in your neighborhood, town, city, county, or state affects you, negatively or otherwise—and these days it’s more often negatively than otherwise for many people.

So, what should you do?

You have three alternatives, summed up in the classic Albert Hirschman formulation: exit, voice, and loyalty. If everything is fine and dandy in your neck of the woods then you can ignore local politics and related doings, and by your silence indicate your loyalty to the present dispensation.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you feel actively threatened in the place where you live then I for one won’t think less of you if you decide to get the hell out of Dodge and exit to somewhere else where you believe you can live a safer and more secure life.

My concern here is with people who have ties to the place where they live, don’t want (or need) to leave it, and are looking to voice their concerns in some way as to effect change. Again, you have multiple alternatives.

The first is protests. I haven’t participated in a protest in many many years (for many reasons), so I’ll leave any judgements on their usefulness, etc., to others.

The second is political and charitable donations, for those who have more money than time. Almost all of my political donations for many years now have been to local candidates: for county council, county executive, board of education, or for the state legislature. A donation of even $10 counts a lot more to a local candidate than it does to a candidate in a presidential or congressional race; if you can afford to give as much as $100 a local candidate may even thank you personally. And by donating early to someone you support who’s running their first local race, you may be helping someone who will go on to higher offices, county-wide, city-wide, or even state-wide.

If you have the money to do so and are OK with attending crowded events with lots of strangers present, I also recommending attending at least one of the local fundraising receptions that almost all politicians hold from time to time. It’s good to meet people in person and introduce yourself; you won’t have an opportunity for a deep discussion of the issues that concern you, but you’ll be better positioned to follow up later with an email or letter.

This same local orientation makes sense for contributions to charities and advocacy groups as well. Instead of giving to national organizations, consider giving to their local chapters or affiliates, or to local groups working in the same space: food banks, advocates for affordable housing, LGBTQ+ activists, whatever. They know the local landscape and are typically more able to make effective use of your donations.

If you have more time than money, a third alternative is following local affairs, attending local meetings and (for issues of special concern to you) giving testimony. As a result of the pandemic many jurisdictions (including mine) have Zoom or similar options for attending meetings and giving testimony, so it’s much easier to do so. And if you’re uncomfortable with testifying ”in person” (physically or virtually), you can submit written testimony.

Showing up (even if virtually) and testifying is really important at the local level, because elected officials typically hear from only a small and unrepresentative slice of the local population, basically people who are old, white, relatively affluent, and either retired or with flexible work schedules. Getting better representation is especially important with topics like planning and zoning where the conversation (at least in jurisdictions like mine) is dominated by that particular group, a group that traditionally has been hostile to affordable housing initiatives, measures to house the unhoused, etc.

(I’d add that some jurisdictions are almost literally begging for people to participate more. For example, my county offers free classes for people who want to know more about the planning and zoning process.)

A final option is to directly participate yourself in local affairs, whether it be as a person blogging or tweeting about local issues, researching and reporting news of interest to your community, serving as a volunteer for a local charity or advocacy group, or volunteering for local political campaigns, including (if you’re up for it) doing canvassing on behalf of your favorite candidates or causes. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in how effective canvassing and related activities can actually be, including with regard to anti-trans legislation and voter initiatives, David Broockman’s papers are a good place to start.)

A couple of final thoughts: First, national conservative groups have for many many years pursued a strategy of promoting local candidates and voter initiatives and stoking political controversies at the local level; the news stories about activist groups coordinating regarding anti-trans legislation are just the latest example of this.

While national advocacy groups can help combat this, ultimately these battles will be won or lost at the local level. As I wrote several years ago, ”it will all come down to winning elections,” especially elections for state legislatures, but also for such supposedly nonpartisan bodies like boards of education.

Second, if you want to make a difference in your local community, be prepared to be in it for the long haul. (This is why I recommend doing this only if you’re committed to staying where you are.) Again, this is something conservative groups know well—many of them have been working for generations now to elect local candidates, promote their proposed legislation, and get their voter initiatives on the ballot.

I can speak from personal experience here. For over ten years now I’ve been writing on my local blog promoting the idea of using ranked choice voting in county elections, and also testified to the county council about it. One of the local politicians reading my blog, originally a Board of Education member, wanted to know more, so in the last couple of years I’ve corresponded with him about the issue, talked to him via Zoom, and met him in person. He was recently elected to the state legislature, and with a colleague introduced a bill authorizing the county to use ranked choice voting in Board of Education elections. I gave testimony on the bill at a hearing conducted by our state legislative delegation.

I fully expect his bill to die in committee this session—the fate of most first bills by first-time legislators. But the issue has now been raised at the state level, has the support of at least two members of the local legislative delegation (out of eleven), and with further work and some luck may result in signed legislation sometime down the road. If it does succeed then it will only be after I’ve spent almost a generation talking about it—a good example of the kind of timeframe you should probably expect.

But when it comes to issues that are personally important to you—and certainly there are issues far more critical to the lives of those reading this than ranked choice voting is to mine—I don’t think there’s any alternative. If you’re committed to your local community and want to make a difference in it then you’ll need to put in some work on an ongoing basis. Otherwise you’ll be at the mercy of those who wish you ill and are working every day to make that wish a reality.

tl;dr: Howard County parents and other voters shouldn’t have the ability to elect Board of Education members taken away from them. Instead they deserve a way to vote for the Board of Education that truly reflects their preferences, namely ranked choice voting.

How we got here, Board of Education edition

Prior to 2020 the Howard County Board of Education was elected at large, with three members elected during presidential election years and four members during gubernatorial election years. The primary election was used as a way to winnow down the number of candidates to be voted on in the general election.

2018 was the last election in which the traditional method was used: there were thirteen Board of Education candidates in the primary, of whom voters could vote for four. The top eight candidates advanced to the general election, at which again voters could vote for four. The top four were elected to the board.

For the 2020 election year the system was changed to have five members of the Board of Education to be elected by district (using the Howard County Council districts) and two members elected at-large in alternate election years.

In the 2020 primary election voters could vote for one candidate in their district. The top two candidates in each district advanced to the general election, at which voters again voted for one candidate. The top candidate in each district was elected to the board.

The at-large members were elected in the 2022 election year. In the 2022 primary election voters could vote for up to two at-large candidates in their district. The top four at-large candidates advanced to the general election, at which voters again voted for up to two candidates. The top two candidates were elected to the board.

A threat to stop voters from electing two board members

Now a new proposal is on the table: to take away the ability of Howard County voters to elect two of the seven Board of Education members they previously elected, and have those members appointed by the Howard County Executive from a list drawn up by the Howard County legislative delegation.

Of the remaining five board members that Howard County voters would still be permitted to elect themselves, two of them would be elected at-large in the same manner as today, and the remaining three would be elected from the Howard County portions of the state senate districts wholly or partly contained within Howard County (currently Districts 9, 12, and 13).

I’m not going to speculate on the possible motives of those proposing this new schemes, what problem they think they are trying to solve, or what they hope to accomplish by taking away the ability of Howard County voters to elect these two board members.

However I do want to point out two potential issues with the proposal:

First, as noted above, the two appointed members would have to be selected from a list prepared by the Howard County legislative delegation. But Howard County shares several of its legislative districts with other counties, including Senate Districts 9 (shared with Carroll County) and 12 (shared with Baltimore County), and House of Delegates District 9A (shared with Montgomery County).

Given that, it’s possible that four of the members of the “Howard County” delegation may not even live in Howard County. What business would they have picking candidates for the Howard County Board of Education?

Second, also as noted above, the three districts with elected Board of Education members would be based on the one Senate district wholly within Howard County (currently District 13) and the Howard County portions of the two Senate districts partially within the county (currently Districts 9 and 12).

But here’s the problem: there’s no guarantee that the Howard County portions of the second and third districts will be equal in population to the first district. It’s quite possible that the second and third districts may have only a few thousand—or even only a few hundred—voters in Howard County, yet those voters would have as much influence over the Board of Education as the tens of thousands of voters elsewhere in the county.

(This problem doesn’t exist with the current Board of Education districts because the councilmanic districts are constrained by the county charter to be approximately equal in population.)

The bottom line: besides taking away the ability of Howard County parents and other voters to select two of the Board of Education members, this proposal is complicated and fraught with potential problems that would further reduce the ability of Howard County voters to influence the composition of the board.

Ranked choice voting: a better alternative

Enough of that. Here I present a better proposal, introduced by Chao Wu and Jen Terrasa, that

• preserves the ability of Howard County voters to elect all members of the Board of Education (except for the student member, of course);
• does a better job of reflecting voters’ true preferences;
• can potentially eliminate the need to have Board of Education primary elections, and thus ensure that the maximum number of voters participates in electing the board; and
• is less prone to some of the problems some people might have had with both the traditional method of electing the Board of Education and the method used in 2020, as well as other methods.

That proposal involves so-called “ranked choice voting,” a scheme that allows voters to rank candidates in order of their preference, and that allows their votes to be transferred to another preferred candidate in the event that their most preferred candidate is not elected. Ranked choice voting is being increasingly adopted by jurisdictions around the US and has been popular with voters in elections where it has been used.

Advantages of ranked choice voting

To expand on what I wrote above, ranked choice voting has the following advantages over current ways of electing either a single Board of Education member (i.e., per district) or at-large board members:

Elimination of primary elections. As discussed in more detail in the next section, a ranked choice election can eliminate the need to have primary elections, since there is no need to winnow down the number of candidates for the general election.

Instead all candidates would run in the general election, and voters could indicate their preferences between them. If a voter’s favorite candidate were not elected then the voter’s indicated preferences could help elect another candidate they also favor. The ranked choice method of counting votes works the same whether there’s one seat to be decided (i.e., for a district) or more than one (i.e., for an at-large seat).

Eliminating primaries is especially important for Board of Education races, because the board is supposed to be a nonpartisan body open to anyone interested in improving the school system, not a body made up of professional politicians primarily interested in pursuing their party’s agenda. Having no primary election means that running for the board should be less expensive and thus open to more potential candidates, and holding the election at general election time means that the voter base will include voters beyond just party activists and partisans.

Reducing “wasted” votes. When there are multiple candidates in a race, voters will often not vote for their favored candidates because their chances of winning are uncertain. Ranked choice voting allows voters to give a first preference vote to their favored candidates and second, third, etc., preferences to other candidates. That way, even if their favored candidate loses, their votes can still help elect other candidates that they like.

Preventing a slim majority of voters from dominating other voters. In the tradition Board of Education elections, or in the current election of at-large members, it is possible for a slim majority of voters to elect all their favored candidates: they simply vote as a bloc for their candidates, so that all those candidates have the most number of votes and are thus elected. This leaves other voters without representation of their views. (Incidentally, this is exactly why traditional at-large elections have been outlawed in many jurisdictions, because they were used as a way to enable a white majority to disenfranchise Black voters.)

This bloc voting strategy doesn’t work in a ranked choice election because of the way the ranked choice mechanism works, giving voters representation in rough propertion to the size of their voting bloc. For example, in an election to pick two at-large board members, a 51% majority could elect one at-large member, but would be very unlikely to succeed in electing two. That’s because there would be enough people in the 49% minority giving their preferences for other candidates that one of those candidates would very likely be elected once all voter preferences were accounted for.

Making it more likely that winning candidates will have broad appeal among voters. The key to winning as a candidate in a ranked choice election is not just to have your core group give you their first preference votes. In an election with three, four, five, or more candidates, it’s unlikely that those votes alone will be enough to put you over the line. Winning thus also requires persuading voters outside your base to mark you as their second or even third preference.

Ranked choice elections work against extreme candidates because they typically won’t get second or third preferences from outside their base. (To use the jargon term, they aren’t “transfer-friendly.”)

Electing district and at-large board members using ranked choice voting

There are multiple ways that ranked choice voting might be used to elect Board of Education members. Here I present two possible schemes, one a variant of the method currently used, and one a variant on the traditional way of electing Board of Education members.

In the first scheme we would continue the current practice of electing five Board of Education members by district (using the five Howard County councilmanic districts) and electing two board members at large, but using ranked choice voting in both types of election.

In the 2020 election the maximum number of Board of Education candidates running in the primary election was six (in District 4); other districts had only four candidates (District 5), three (Districts 2 and 3), or two candidates (District 1, where no primary was needed).

As discussed above, with ranked choice voting we could skip the primary election and have all Board of Education district candidates run in the general election. Voters would rank candidates in order of their preference, and then the ranked choice vote counting scheme would go as follows:

1. If any candidate received more than 50% of the first preference votes then they would automatically be elected.
2. If no candidate received more than 50% of the first preference vote, then the candidate with the least number of first preference votes would be eliminated, and their votes transferred to other candidates according to the preferences of the voters who gave the eliminated candidate their first preference.
3. The process of eliminating candidates and transferring their votes would continue until one candidates accumulated enough votes to go over the 50% mark.

Note that when electing a single candidate, ranked choice voting is often referred to as instant-runoff voting: because voters would have already expressed their preferences for their second, third, etc., choices, there would be no need to hold a separate runoff election if one candidate didn’t receive more than 50% of the votes in the first round.

In 2022 eight Board of Education candidates ran in the primary for the two at-large seats. Again, we could dispense with the primary election and just have all candidates run in the general election, with two board members elected using ranked choice voting. The process would be similar to that described above, except that the “quota” would be 33.3%: any candidate receiving more than that number of votes, whether from first preference votes or from votes transferred from others, would be deemed elected.

Electing all board members county-wide with ranked choice voting

In this alternate scheme we would revert to the traditional method of electing three at-large Board of Education members elected during presidential election years and four at-large members during gubernatorial election years. The only difference would be to use ranked choice voting in the elections to select the top candidates, similar to what was described above for using ranked choice voting to elect two at-large members.

Again we could dispense with the primary and just have voters rank all candidates in the general election. In that case the quota for being elected would be 20% plus 1 when electing four board members, and 25% plus 1 when electing three.

Addressing objections to ranked choice voting

There are various objections that might be made to using ranked choice voting for Board of Education elections. In this section I address those objections.

“Ranked choice voting is too complicated for voters.” I don’t see this as an issue at all. Experience with other jurisdictions, including New York City, has indicated that voters understand the process of ranking candidates and are generally satisfied with the results. Howard County has a relatively highly educated population; if voters in New York City can understand ranked choice voting then I’m sure voters here can as well.

“Ranked choice voting is too complicated and expensive for the Howard County Board of Elections.” There would be some added expenses in conducting a ranked choice election, mainly to design the ballots and implement the special process for tabulating results. However, there are plenty of resources available for election officials on how to run ranked choice elections successfully and efficiently, and free and open source ranked choice tabulation software (e.g., RCTab) that has already been certified for use in several jurisdictions. It’s also possible that the Board of Elections could offset some or all of the cost by not conducting Board of Education primary elections, as discussed above.

“Since the ranked choice voting calculations depend on knowing the total number of voters, election results will take a long time to determine if voters can vote by mail.” The short answer here is that traditional elections can also take a long time to be decided when mail ballots arrive late, as happened in the 2022 House of Delegates race for District 9A. That’s a universal trade-off with voting by mail, if voters are allowed to mail ballots up to 8:00 PM on election day.

The longer answer is that since the ranked choice calculations can be easily and quickly done by computer, the Board of Elections could simply release intermediate results, including the effects of voters’ second, third, etc., preferences, as the votes come in. As with other elections, results would not be final until all late ballots were accounted for and any other ballot-related issues were resolved.

“The ranked choice voting computations are a ‘black box,’ and we don’t have confidence in the way the calculations are done.” This issue can be addressed by using open source software (like RCTab, mentioned above) to provide transparency for how the calculations are done, and then releasing data for the final certified results showing all ballots and how they were marked. This would enable other people (like me, or anyone else able to run the software) to double-check the official results.

“Ranked choice voting would unduly disadvantage (or unduly advantage—take your pick) parents’ groups, the Howard County Education Association, the Democratic or Republican parties, or other interest groups.” Interest groups could still make endorsements like they currently do, indicating which candidates should (in their view) receive voter preferences, and which should not. If they strongly favor some preferred candidates over others, they can specify how they think voters should rank them.

The only real caution interest groups would need to take would be to not endorse too many candidates, lest voters split their first preference votes between them and cause none of them to be elected in the first round. As noted above, this is actually an advantage of ranked choice voting: it reduces the ability of a 51% majority to elect all at-large members by bloc voting for a slate of candidates.

“Ranked choice voting is inferior to approval voting.” This is a more esoteric objection, but is worth addressing. Approval voting is a different voting scheme in which voters simply mark which candidates are acceptable to them—and can approve of more than one—and then the candidate with the most “approvals” is elected. Regardless of whether approval voting is superior to ranked choice voting, either in theory or in practice, its greater simplicity is only present in elections where a single candidate is elected.

So-called “multiwinner approval voting” is more complicated, requiring a choice between multiple methods of counting approval ballots. It would be simpler for both voters and election officials to use a standard ranked choice mechanism for both single-winner districts and multi-winner at-large seats.

“Ranked choice voting could produce a result that doesn’t reflect who should actually win.” There are no perfect voting systems that are guaranteed to produce intuitively “correct” results in every possible scenario. Ranked choice voting is no exception.

But ranked choice voting has been successfully used for many elections, not only in the US but also in juridictions like Ireland and Northern Ireland, which have conducted dozens of elections and elected hundreds of officeholders using ranked choice voting. (They just call it something different: “proportional representation with a single transferable vote,” or PR-STV.) There is no reason to think it can’t work just as well in Howard County.

For further exploration

• Proposed legislation relating to election of the Howard County Board of Education:
  • Ho. Co. 10-23. Proposed legislation to make two members of the Board of Education appointed, not elected. Sponsored by the chair of the Howard County delegation.
  • Ho. Co. 16-23. Proposed legislation to allow Howard County to elect the Board of Education using ranked choice voting. Sponsored by Chao Wu and Jen Terrasa.
• Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. Includes resources for election administrators, the RCTab tabulation software, and links to ballot data for past ranked choice elections in several jurisdictions.

[This post was originally published on Cohost. It has been slightly revised from the original.]

This post—and some future ones as well—was prompted by a book I once read about the prospects for creating a new university, as well as by general comments I’ve read about admissions policies at elite universities. Since I am decidedly not an expert on issues of higher education, I decided to approach this from the other direction: as a naïve observer doing a “spherical cow” analysis (as physicists like to call it), abstracting away all the complexity and seeing what results from analyzing a problem in as simple terms as possible.

Canadian higher education expert Alex Usher once referred to elite universities as the “apex predators” of the academic world, based on their continued appearances at the top of world rankings. With that in mind, let’s look at Harvard in particular, one of the best known and most elite universities, and consider it as we would a biological organism. What are its main characteristics, and how does it survive?

Harvard lives despite things that could kill it

First, considered as an organism the most notable characteristic of Harvard is how long-lived it is: nearly four hundred years old at this point. (And it is still relatively young in comparison to others of its species; Oxford and Cambridge are both almost a thousand years old.)

From this fact we can conclude that the first and foremost priority of Harvard is to ensure its own survival. If this were not the case then Harvard would likely have ceased to exist by now, as pursuing other priorities would have endangered its quest to survive.

What are the most important threats to Harvard’s survival? They are arguably financial reverses, political reverses, and cultural reverses:

Financial reverses, either local to itself or in the broader economy, could cause Harvard to go bankrupt and force its closure. Consistent with its long lifetime, Harvard must plan for possible financial reversals of a scale that might occur only once every couple of hundred years.

What about political reverses? These are potential government actions that would threaten Harvard as an institution. This might include, for example, taxing Harvard’s endowment or otherwise financially penalizing the university, forcing it to modify its admissions policies (see below), or otherwise interfering with the relative independence Harvard enjoys as a private university that is (mostly) privately funded.

Finally cultural reverses would threaten Harvard’s status as “Harvard”, its reputation as a world-leading university that others might seek to emulate in their own countries or regions (“the Harvard of X”) but can never equal, much less surpass. Harvard is vulnerable to such reverses because in some ways it is like Kim Kardashian and similar celebrities: to a nontrivial degree it is “famous for being famous”.

Harvard’s defenses

How does Harvard protect itself against such reverses? We can analyze this by again looking at Harvard as if it were an organism. To survive an organism takes in food, creates protein products and other structures to build and maintain the body it needs to survive in a hostile environment, and excretes whatever is excess to that function.

From that point of view, Harvard’s “food” is the very large group of people (over sixty thousand per year) striving to be admitted to Harvard. It uses that “food” to create the visible structures that people think of when they think of Harvard (the buildings and faculty), to create a store of “fat” for times of potential starvation (its endowment), and to build an “extended phenotype” consisting of the Harvard alumni network, the much smaller group of people (less than two thousand per year) who go out into the world with “admitted into Harvard” stamped on their foreheads. (I write “admitted into Harvard” instead of “graduated from Harvard” because, as examples like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg illustrate, arguably the important thing is getting into Harvard, not graduating from it.)

(Under this analogy, research results can be considered as Harvard’s excreta: the things it throws off as it survives as an institution down the years, and that have fertilized many fields.)

For purposes of this analysis I focus on the Harvard alumni network. How does it help Harvard address the threat of the various possible reverses discussed above?

The threat of financial reverses can be addressed by having Harvard alumni whose financial success can translate into donations to help Harvard maintain and grow its endowment. That endowment is currently over USD 50 billion; it provides about 36% of Harvard’s annual revenue, or over USD 2 billion a year.

USD 50 billion sounds like a lot of money, and it is; it’s the largest endowment of any US university. But that endowment needs to be so large because it needs to cover very rare “black swan” financial disasters. I’m sure that the folks who run Harvard would be happy to see it be two or three times its current size, if not larger.

The threat of political reverses can be addressed by having a large contingent of Harvard alumni in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government who are sympathetic to Harvard and who can be relied upon to block or water down any government actions that might disadvantage it.

Finally, the threat of cultural reverses can be addressed in a similar way, by having a large contingent of Harvard alumni in key cultural institutions – leading newspapers, magazines, publishers, and so on – that have the power to confer cachet upon Harvard and those associated with it.

Explaining the Harvard admissions process

Now, the above is nothing more than a cute and overly clever analogy unless it has some degree of explanatory power. So, given the above, what can we conclude about Harvard, and in particular about its key function, that of creating a select set of Harvard alumni?

First, to counter potential financial reverses Harvard needs to build an alumni population that is willing and able to financially support it in a major way, so that its endowment can grow ever larger. This can be done by preferentially taking in applicants who are wealthy already, or likely to be wealthy in future.

Harvard has at least three strategies available by which to do this: it has a “farm system” of exclusive (and expensive) prep schools whose staff have deep and enduring relationships with the Harvard admissions department, it gives preferential treatment to the children of Harvard alumni (“legacies”), and it can also of course just admit the children of major donors. The overall result is to build a pool of alumni who have benefited from special treatment in admissions, who are inclined to “give back” to Harvard in return, and who will have the financial means to do so.

Second, to counter potential political reverses Harvard needs to build a supportive network of legislators, judges, and executive branch senior leaders. Since most such figures are lawyers (by definition true for judges, and almost as true for legislators), it’s obviously key for Harvard to have a strong law school. But perhaps equally if not more important, Harvard needs to have a feel for which groups within American society have political power (or at least political influence) and then ensure that it admits students from such groups in proper proportion to such power and influence.

To put it in a more negative way: if (to pick a fictional example) Graustarkian-Americans have relatively little power or influence in the US political system, then Harvard has less incentive to admit them as students, even if they otherwise form a relatively large percentage of qualified applicants. Harvard would likely instead preferentially admit students from other groups with more political clout.

Finally, to counter potential cultural reverses Harvard needs a similar supportive network of journalists, public intellectuals, and other media figures at major cultural institutions. The presumed mechanism here is to put much more emphasis on admitting students who are verbally skilled and culturally fluent at the expense of students who are more STEM-focused.

To put it more bluntly, Harvard is not CalTech, and does not want to be; its place in American culture as the ultimate university experience is exemplified by Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, not by Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. (It’s worth noting here that the original novel Legally Blonde is set at Stanford; presumably the people who made the movie felt that using Harvard as the setting would resonate more with the typical viewer.)

Harvard forever

Given the above, what predictions can we make about Harvard’s future, particularly with respect to its admission policies?

First, I predict that Harvard will not follow the urgings of those who advocate it doubling or even tripling the number of students it enrolls (presumably in order to give more students the “Harvard experience”.

Part of the reason is by analogy to long-lived organisms (like the Greenland shark pictured above), which have long lives in large part because their metabolism is very slow. Even a very low rate of growth in enrollment would cause Harvard to balloon to an enormous size when extended over a few hundred years. Another reason is that increased enrollment would put more pressure on the endowment, should it become necessary to draw it down during hard financial times.

But I think the most important reason is that the pool of suitable positions for Harvard alumni is limited, and will remain so: There are only 535 Senate and House seats, less than a thousand Federal judgeships, only so many jobs at presitigious investment banks and private equity firms, and similarly only so many positions at leading newspapers, magazines, and related cultural institutions. Given that, increasing the number of Harvard alumni (a form of “elite overproduction”) would only increase the already intense competition for those positions, with little or no benefit to Harvard itself and its ability to survive as an elite university.

Second, I predict that Harvard will not change its admissions policies in any major way (for example, by instituting a lottery for admittance), and will not be forced to do so by US courts or legislatures. (As, for example, is at stake in a case currently before the US Supreme Court.) As I argue above, Harvard’s long-term survival depends on its having the freedom to tailor its student body to address potential financial, political, and cultural threats. I believe that its political and legal support network is strong and motivated enough to ensure that it retains that freedom.

Finally, if Harvard by some chance is forced to modify its admissions policies, I predict that it will attempt to accomplish its previous goals by different means. For example, it would likely further de-emphasize criteria such as test scores, grades, and student background (race, ethnicity, class, etc.), and put even more emphasis on student personality, ability to fit into the Harvard environment, recommendations from alumni, general “promise”, and other intangible aspects used to assess an applicant’s suitability to be a “Harvard person”. (In other words, Harvard’s admissions process would become even more opaque than it already is.)

Harvard has survived nearly four hundred years by doggedly pursuing its own interests and acting to neutralize potential threats to its survival. I would not bet against its ability to survive four hundred more.

This will take a bit of explanation: Jorie Graham is a well-known American poet (well, at least among people who read poetry) who has a refined and sophisticated image ("… raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools … studied philosophy at the Sorbonne …"). So I was surprised today to find that she’s on Twitter and tweets a lot, primarily about political stuff.

(Her Twitter profile doesn’t even mention that she’s a poet; in fact it has no biographical information about her at all. But if you look at her past tweets and who she follows, you’ll know that she’s “our” Jorie Graham.)

I found it quite amusing to think of “one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation” retired (she’s 72) and sitting at home sipping a glass of wine, obsessively watching MSNBC and tweeting about the mid-terms and how to get the most impact out of your political donations.

PS to any Anifam discord folks reading this: I’ll be featuring Graham in a future Sunday night poetry post.

[I wrote this as a pseudonymous Twitter thread back in 2020 and then published it as a Cohost post in 2022. Given the ongoing discourse about China and Taiwan, I thought it was worth publishing it on my own site. I’m a total newbie when it comes to China, Taiwan, and international relations, so consider this as published for amusement purposes only.]

A while back I watched various films and dramas on the Taiwanese LGBTQ streaming service GagaooLala. If I were an academic and actually knew something about this topic, I’d write a paper “The Geopolitical Uses of Lesbian Romcoms: Zero Chou’s Six Asian Cities Rainbow Project as Taiwanese Soft Power Projection.” But I’m not, so this post will have to do.

As of 2020 when I originally wrote this, Zero Chou’s project consisted of two films and two TV series featuring ethnic Chinese across East Asia: We Are Gamily (“Gamily” presumably from “Gay Family”) (2017, filmed in Chengdu in Sichuan), The Substitute (2017, Beijing), Handsome Stewardess (2019, Singapore), and Wrath of Desire (2020, Hong Kong). I watched the first three of these on GagaooLala.

These films were “advised by” the Taiwan Ministry of Culture, and I believe partially funded directly or indirectly by the Ministry of Culture as well, along with a wider Taiwanese LGBTQ media ecosystem (headed by entrepreneur Jay Lin) that includes GOL Studios, the GagaTai and LalaTai websites, and GagaooLala itself. Why would the Taiwanese government do this?

The answer presumably lies in geopolitics, and specifically in Taiwan’s fraught relations with China. Some claim that Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party envision not only an expanded China restored to greatness, but a world remade to China’s liking. In this vision, Western powers like the US and the EU would be sidelined, and other powers would acknowledge the superiority of (and seek to emulate) China and the CCP (which would be seen as one and the same).

This goal would be accomplished via political, military, economic, and cultural means: ensuring internal order within China, following up the absorption of Hong Kong by annexing Taiwan, alternately overawing and subsidizing China’s Asian neighbors, winning the cooperation of Western businesses in exchange for access to the Chinese market, and attempting to influence Western culture and politics through various means.

Presumably the CCP wishes that the ascendance of China and the identification of China with the CCP be seen as desirable by as many people and powers as possible. But if that is not always possible, the CCP presumably wishes the rise of China to be seen as inevitable: that there is and can only be “one China,” with the CCP seen as the only true and correct ruler of China and the Chinese people, wherever they might live.

Because of its much smaller population and economy, Taiwan cannot match the People’s Republic in most spheres. However, in its sponsorship of GagaooLala and similar ventures, the Taiwanese government can be seen as pursuing an asymmetric strategy to “queer” the (for now, metaphorical) battlefield: promoting an alternative that is culturally Chinese but open to other cultures and ethnicities, and that respects and even celebrates differences.

For example: in We Are Gamily a Chinese lesbian in a marriage of convenience with a gay friend works under a CCP member who repeats bland slogans about social harmony. The young lesbian has internalized these slogans, but after falling in love with her husband’s sister she opts for truth to oneself over “harmony.”

Taiwan is not mentioned in We Are Gamily. The only non-PRC influence is in the form of her husband’s white South African lover, who discusses same-sex marriage in his home country. However the Chengdu setting may be a tell: not only is Chengdu supposedly a relatively friendly city for LGBTQ people, the city was the last redoubt of the Chinese Nationalist Party before fleeing to Taiwan in 1949.

Handsome Stewardess goes to one-party-ruled Singapore, as a Taiwanese lesbian joins an airline based in the city-state and proceeds to agitate against harassment and company policies. Her girlfriend claims that Singapore’s rules promote “stability,” but at the conclusion of the series ends up siding with her Taiwanese partner.

Both these series foreground family: In We Are Gamily the LGBTQ siblings’ desire to live true to themselves is ultimately accepted by their mother, while in Handsome Stewardess the titular character’s parents encourage her to find a nice girl and marry, now that Taiwan law permits it. (However, her mother does have to remind her that the current law permits such marriages only if both individuals are citizens of jurisdictions with marriage equality.)

Finally, The Substitute features cross-strait relations, as a Beijing judo star is bested and seduced by a Taiwanese exchange student, is set to double for her in an action film, then becomes a star herself upon the other girl’s disappearance. The finale sees them reconciled in Taiwan.

In sum, the “Six Asian Cities Rainbow Project” presents a vision of “liberal democracy with Taiwanese characteristics,” one that is rooted in and respectful of tradition (see also Chou’s earlier film Splendid Float). This vision is compatible with “family values,” but also allows for individual freedom and differences.

The presumed goals are multiple: First, to heighten the perceived differences between Taiwan and the PRC, and position Taiwan as a potential model for young Chinese people to emulate. If even 2% of China’s 1.4 billion people are LGBTQ, they would outnumber the entire population of Taiwan; presumably they are a key audience for Taiwanese cultural outreach. There is also a large population of young people in China who are fans of LGBTQ-related (or at least LGBTQ-adjacent) content, like danmei novels.

Second, to promote a positive image of Taiwan among young people (Chinese or otherwise) living in countries in Southeast Asia that are potential allies of Taiwan. Again, we can see this effort as in part targeted to the large BL and (to a lesser extent) yuri fan communities in countries like Thailand and the Philippines.

And finally (aided by GagaooLala’s global expansion), to give Westerners more knowledge of Taiwan and reasons to care about its fate (as, for example, many in the West—and in Taiwan itself—now care about the fate of Ukraine).

We now come to Stalin’s famous question: How many divisions does GagaooLala have? If the CCP decides that force is the only way to “unify” China, will the people of Taiwan be able and willing to do the things necessary to defend their country, including reorganizing the Taiwanese armed forces to be more effective? Certainly some have questioned this.

But political will follows popular will. If Taiwan’s autonomy is to be defended, its people—and its young people in particular—must see it as worth defending. And if Taiwan’s army is disadvantaged by being seen as the past enabler of authoritarian rule, then it must evolve to become an institution seen as the guarantor of Taiwanese democracy and freedom—including the freedoms celebrated in Chou’s films and TV series.

Taiwan may never be truly sovereign and independent, but a combination of cultural change, military reform, and support from the US and other nations may enable it to survive as a country unto itself, and not as a mere province of an expanded China. As Adam Chen-Dedman asks, “Might Taiwan’s embrace of democracy and respect for human rights—as a radical people-centered form of ‘warm’ power—offer a way to decolonize its own ‘inevitable’ extinction at the hands of its neo-imperial neighbor?” The answer remains unclear, but the question is a critical one for the future of Taiwan, Asia, and the world.

This is a follow-up to my seven-part series (starting with part 1) on expanding the Howard County Council, using ranked choice voting to elect council members, and leveraging automated redistricting software overseen by an independent redistricting commission.

This particular post describes an alternative to the three-district map proposed in that series and illustrated in part 5: I retain the idea of a fifteen-member county council, but instead of using three districts (with five members each) I use five districts (as with the current council), electing three members in each district. As in the previous example I assume the use of ranked choice voting.

An example five district map

The map above shows the five districts produced by the Auto-Redistrict software based on the data and options I provided. The new districts divide the county into the following areas; I’ve numbered the districts so that they roughly correspond with the current council districts:

• District 1. Ellicott City.
• District 2. Northeastern Howard County, including Elkridge.
• District 3. Southeastern Howard County, including North Laurel, Savage, Maple Lawn, and Fulton, as well as the Village of Kings Contrivance.
• District 4. Central Columbia, excluding some outlying villages.
• District 5. Western Howard County, including the Villages of River Hill and Harper’s Choice.

Because of the way that the Auto-Redistrict software works, starting from a random assignment of precincts to districts and then “evolving” the map from there, each run may end up producing a somewhat different map. For this run I was lucky, as I think this particular map does a really good job of matching up with the key population centers in the county. The main departure is that Columbia is too populous to fit into a single district; the proposed District 4 includes only about two-thirds of Columbia’s population.

Based on the 2020 Census figures, the racial and ethnic groups in these five districts would break down as follows:

• District 1. Non-Hispanic Whites would comprise about half the population of this of this district, at 49%, with Asians the next largest group at about 31%. Non-Hispanic Blacks would comprise about 10% of the population at 10%, with multi-racial people (or people of other races) and people of Hispanic origin the smallest groups, at about 5% each.
• District 2. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a slight minority in this district, at about 46%. Blacks and Asians would be roughly equal as a proportion of the population, at about 20% and 21% respectively. People of Hispanic origin would be about 10%, and multi-racial people or people of other races about 6%.
• District 3. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a distinct minority in this district, at 41% of the population, with Blacks and Asians about 25% and 18% respectively. The proportions of people of Hispanic origin and multi-racial people (or people of other races) would be comparable those in District 2, at 10% and 6% respectively.
• District 4. Non-Hispanic Whites would again be a distinct minority in this district, at 42%. This district would have the highest Black population, at 30%. The next most populous group would be people of Hispanic orgin at 12%, with Asians at 9% and multi-racial people and people of other races at 7%.
• District 5. This would be the only district with a non-Hispanic White majority, at 58%. The proportion of Asians would be about 21% (similar to District 2), while the proportion of Non-Hispanic Blacks would be about 11% (similar to District 1). The proportions of people of Hispance origin and multi-racial people (or people of other races) would be similar to those in District 1, at %% each.

(For figures for Howard County as a whole, see part 5 of the redistricting series.)

Assuming some level of vote transfers, Blacks would be well-positioned to win seats in Districts 4, 3, and 2 (in that order), while Asians would be positioned to win seats in Districts 1, 2, and 5. (Again, see part 5 for a caution about interpreting “Asians” as a monolithic demographic group.)

The remaining nine seats would likely go to Non-Hispanic Whites. As of the 2020 Census Non-Hispanic Whites are now a minority in the county overall, but they’d likely still comprise a majority on the county council—though not as much so as at present.

How would Democratic and Republican candidates fare in each district, and what might the final makeup of the Howard County Council look like? When ranked choice voting is used in a three-member district, a candidate is automatically elected if they are selected as the first preference on at least 25% plus one of the ballots cast (the “quota”).

So, for example, in the precincts comprising the proposed new District 1 I estimated the Republican share of the total vote for Howard County Council in the 2018 general election at about 38%. If a single Republican candidate ran in the Northeast District they would pretty much be guaranteed to be designated as the most preferred candidate by more than 25% of voters. The Republican Party would thus have one “safe” seat in the proposed District 1.

On the other hand, for the precincts in the proposed new District 1 I estimated the Democratic share of the county council vote in 2018 at about 62%. Suppose that only two Democratic candidates ran in the Northeast District and they each received roughly equal shares of the first preference votes—in other words, about half of Democratic voters picked the first candidate as their most preferred candidate and about half of Democrats gave their first preference to the second candidate.

Then given a 62% Democratic vote share each candidate would be designated as the most preferred candidate by about 31% of voters, well over the quota of 25% plus one, and both would automatically be elected. The Democratic Party would thus have two “safe” seats in the Northeast District.

With one Republican seat and two Democratic seats that would fill all three seats in the district. The Democratic party might be tempted to run three candidates, or the Republican party two, but they’d be running a risk in doing so. (See part 6 for a more in-depth discussion of this issue.)

A similar analysis can be done for the other districts. A summary of the likely results for all districts is as follows:

• District 1. Party breakdown: 62% Democrats, 38% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat.
• District 2. Party breakdown: 64% Democrats, 36% Republicans (similar to District 1). Likely two safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat.
• District 3. Party breakdown: 71% Democrats, 29% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats and one safe Republican seat, although it’s possible that Democrats might be able to win all three seats against a weak Republican candidate.
• District 4. Party breakdown: 77% Democrats, 23% Republicans. Democrats would have an even better chance here for a three-seat sweep.
• District 5. Party breakdown: 51% Democrats, 49% Republicans. This would likely be a true swing district, with one safe Democratic seat, one safe Republican seat, and one seat a toss-up.

Overall with this district map and the use of ranked choice voting Democrats would likely win at least nine or ten seats on the Howard County Council and Republicans at least four. The remaining one or two seats would be in play, with the most likely result being a 10-5 or 11-4 Democratic majority—a more balanced result than the 4-1 Democratic majority on the current council. (And as noted in a previous post it’s also possible that a third party or independent candidate could capture a seat and act as a deciding vote on the council.)

Overall the idea of electing fifteen council members from five districts has a lot to recommend it: the use of five districts is a continuation of current practice, and the resulting map is very reflective of the geography of the county.

Electing only three members per district using ranked choice voting (as opposed to five) would also simplify both ballot design and the task of voters: there would likely be fewer candidates on the ballot to rank, and in some cases Republican voters at least would likely only need to indicate a first preference (assuming that they were indifferent as to which Democratic candidates were elected).

The major downside of this approach, at least from the point of view of the Republican party, is that it somewhat disadvantages Republican candidates relative to electing five members in each of three districts. That’s a general issue with ranked choice voting: for a minority party’s results to match its vote share, it helps to have more candidates on the ballot for voters to rank.

For further exploration

For the code used to generate the graphs above, see my document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 4. For the data behind the district maps see Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1. I ran the Auto-Redistrict application as described in part 4 of my redistricting series, using the same input data and the same settings, except that I specified five districts with three members each instead of three districts with five members each.

[This is part 7 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this final post I discuss what motivated me to spend the considerable amount of time it took to research the issue of county council redistricting, to analyze the data and find software to create a proposed district map, and to write this series.

Why do I care about this?

As I discussed in a previous post, my proposal would reduce the likely Democratic majority on the Howard County Council and allow Republicans to win proportionally more seats than they currently do. My fellow Democrats might therefore ask me, “Frank, what the heck are you thinking?!?” My answer is as follows:

First, in addition to being a proud and lifelong Democrat I am a strong believer in the value of liberal democracy: that liberty is best secured by a political system in which every person has equal power to influence government actions through their votes. Partisan gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression work against that ideal.

The Republican Party was once the party that freed the slaves, amended the Constitution to help secure their rights, and made it possible for some of them (i.e., the men) to vote for the first time ever. How the GOP wishes to treat that great legacy through its present-day actions is its own business.

But my own party has evolved from being the past architect of Jim Crow, and I abhor anything it might do that reminds us of the days of the poll tax, voter “literacy” tests, and other measures that served to make the votes of some people worth more than those of other people.

Second, if we are ever to move beyond our current polarized and poisoned political environment then that process will have to start at the local level, where the rewards for political misbehavior are less and a dedicated movement for electoral reform might have a better chance of being successful.

Finally, I believe that campaigning in a more competitive political environment will ultimately be good for the Democratic Party. Partisan gerrymandering can make for a weak party: why bother doing the hard work of grassroots organizing when you can just redraw district lines every ten years to give yourself a structural advantage over the other party?

(And as a corollary, a weak party is a party that can find itself taken over by politicians primarily interested in their own success rather than that of their party and their fellow candidates and elected officials.)

I think that improving the future prospects of the Democratic Party at a state and national level starts with building strong county- and city-level party organizations. Running under a ranked choice voting system would mean that those organizations couldn’t afford to get lazy when it comes to winning elections. And a stronger Democratic party that can win competitive elections means increased opportunities to advance the interests of Democratic voters and of Americans in general.

Betting on an alternative

OK, so I care about this issue. But why spend so much time working on this series of blog posts and the data analyses behind them, when it’s not clear that anyone else cares about this? As David Clifton remarked on Facebook, “I haven’t noticed people lining up outside the council building to complain they feel they have inadequate representation.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe Howard County Republicans don’t care that they only have 20% of the seats on the county council despite having at least a third of the vote share. Maybe Democratic voters in District 5, or Republican voters in some other districts, don’t care that they don’t have a realistic chance of electing a council member from their own party.

Maybe young Democratic activists looking to run for elective office are happy to wait a decade or more for one of the few county council seats to open up, as Democratic council members are term-limited or move on to other offices. Maybe all the people with political ambitions in Howard County are content to work within the current two-party system.

And maybe Chinese-Americans, or Indian-Americans, or Korean-Americans, or people of Hispanic origin, or members of any of the other racial and ethnic groups in the county, don’t mind that no one of their background has ever been elected to the county council.

The work I put into creating this series of posts is in effect one big bet that there are people out there who are not happy with the way we currently elect the Howard County Council, and would like to see some alternative proposals. But the alternatives that have traditionally been on offer—an increased number of single-member districts, or a few at-large seats, both elected by the traditional “first past the post” method—will likely not address people’s concerns.

We know this because Howard County has already tried these methods: The initial use of five at-large county council seats led to Democratic dominance on the council beyond what the Democratic vote share would warrant. Howard County Republicans put a lot of effort into promoting and ultimately achieving a switch to five council districts, only to eventually find that this mechanism was vulnerable to Democratic gerrymandering of the district lines.

The computer scientist Alan Kay once said of the original Apple Macintosh that it was “the first personal computer good enough to be criticized”. That was my goal with this series of posts: to put forth an alternative plan for Howard County Council redistricting that seriously attempted to address issues with the current council district system, was backed up by a reasonable amount of data analysis (sufficient at least for a first attempt), and produced a district map and associated party and racial/ethnic breakdowns that could be usefully evaluated and compared against other alternatives. Whether or not I’ve succeeded in that goal I leave to others to judge.

Anyway, that’s it for me. I’m a blogger, not an activist or organizer. If anyone else wants to take these ideas and run with them they’re welcome to do so. In the meantime I’d be happy to answer any further questions and concerns others might have about this proposal, and will update the previous Q&A post as appropriate.

For further exploration

There are a number of other explorations that could be done relative to Howard County Council redistricting and alternative electoral systems. I list some of them here in case anyone wants to take them on.

• Repeat my redistricting analysis, but using census blocks as the basic unit of the districts instead of precincts.
• Do simulations of ranked choice elections for the proposed three districts using one of the many RCV simulators available. (Just do an Internet search for “ranked choice voting simulator.”)
• Repeat the redistricting exercise I did, but for other numbers of council districts or members per district, for example five districts with three members each (for the same total of fifteen members as my proposal) or three districts with three members each (for a total of nine).
• Do an analysis of the current five single-member council districts, but using ranked choice voting (in this context known as “instant-runoff voting or IRV) instead of “first past the post.”
• Repeat the previous analysis, but use approval voting instead of ranked choice voting. (This would require some assumptions on how voters would vote in such a system.)
• Analyze councils with seven, nine, eleven, or thirteen single-member districts, elected using ranked choice voting.
• Repeat the previous analyses with approval voting instead.

[This is part 6 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I attempt to answer various questions people have raised about this proposal. (Note: I also addressed other questions about ranked choice voting for Howard County Council elections in an earlier post, “Ranked choice voting: questions and answers”; however that post assumed electing only one council member per district. Also, I may make updates to this post if I get further questions that merit answers, or if some of my answers turn out to be incorrect or incomplete.)

Expanding the council and having fewer districts

Doesn’t Howard County’s charter provide for automatically expanding the number of council members based on population?

Unfortunately, it does not. The county charter specifically states that

The legislative power of the County is vested in the County Council of Howard County which shall consist of five members who shall be elected from the Councilmanic Districts. . . . Each Councilmanic District shall elect one Council member. (Section 202. The County Council.)

So the county charter would need to be changed even just to add new council members, let alone move to multi-member districts.

A related question is whether the use of multi-member districts is consistent with the Maryland Constitution. The relevant language is as follows:

The charter for the government of any county governed by the provisions of this Article may provide for the election of members of the county council by the voters of councilmanic districts therein established, or by the voters of the entire county, or by a combination of these methods of election. (Article XI-A, Section 3A.)

This doesn’t explicitly rule out having a county council elected from multi-member districts, but it doesn’t explicitly permit it either.

If each district had five county council members, how would a person know which of their council members to call if they needed help?

First, this is a problem Howard County has faced before. Liz Bobo, Ed Cochran, C. Vernon Gray, Lloyd Knowles, and Ginny Thomas were all elected to the Howard County Council during a time when council members were elected at large, before council districts were adopted in 1984. So in a sense each of them had the entire county population for their constituency, and we can look to their experience to see how this worked in practice.

My own answer is as follows: If a constituent has five council members whom they can go to for assistance or to lobby for something, they’ll go to whomever has a particular interest or expertise in the issue at question, has proved helpful in the past, and/or has political views congenial to themselves.

Each council member in a district would likely have natural constituencies, based on the area of the county in which they live, particular interest groups they represent, and so on. For example, someone living in Ellicott City concerned about, say, Route 40 development would likely contact whichever council member in the West District happened to live in Ellicott City and seemed interested in that issue.

Council members within a district might then compete with each other to provide services to their constituents and address their concerns. It’s possible that in some cases a constituent who’s a Democratic voter may prefer dealing with a Republican council member, or vice versa, because they find that that council member is more effective at getting things done for them. But it’s also possible that they might join forces and establish unified channels for dealing with constituent requests, especially if they were of the same party.

Could we find fifteen people who could and would invest the time to serve on an expanded county council? And wouldn’t that be expensive?

I think there are more than enough ambitious political activists of all parties and ideologies in Howard to fill a fifteen-member council. And I would rather have them running for the county council and leave the Board of Education elections to people whose primary interest is in overseeing the Howard County Public School System.

As for the expense, in the proposed Howard County FY22 operating budget the budget for the county council is just under $6 million out of an overall budget of $1.8 billion, or about 0.3%. Even if it doubled or tripled with an expanded county council it would still be under 1% of county operating expenditures.

Wouldn’t expanding the county council expand the power of the county executive by weakening the ability of any one council member to hold the county executive accountable?

A county council is a legislature, and it’s inherent in the nature of a legislature that there will be many legislators relative to the executive. Even with a fifteen-member council an individual council member would have significantly more power to affect legislation and hold the executive branch accountable than (say) a typical Maryland state delegate out of the 141 members of the House of Delegates, or a typical state senator out of the 47 members of the Maryland Senate.

In practice I suspect that a fifteen-member council would delegate much of its work to committees, and the committee heads would hold significant power in terms of holding the county executive accountable.

If we reduce the number of districts from five to three, would western Howard County have any representation at all?

As discussed in the previous post, one of the three proposed districts would include western Howard County, and would have five council members (out of fifteen). It would be roughly equivalent to the current District 5, but a bit bigger, since it would contain about one hundred-ten thousand people vs. about sixty thousand today. I’m confident at least some of the five council members from the proposed West District would be from western Howard proper (as opposed to, say, Ellicott City or River Hill).

Wouldn’t decreasing the number of districts to three increase the potential to gerrymander districts so that no Republicans get elected to the Council?

This might be the case if members within each district were elected at-large. However ranked choice voting has the effect of ensuring Democratic or Republican shares of seats proportional to the parties’ vote shares. See my previous post.

Wouldn’t this proposal reduce the diversity of representation in terms of the different types of communities in Howard County, and enable certain high density areas to control the agenda?

My guess here is that the concern is with reducing the number of districts from five to three, thus lumping different different communities into larger subdivisions. My response is that even though the number of districts would be smaller, the number of council members per district would be much larger, and that would allow more effective representation of different communities.

For example, in the proposed West District there would be three relatively large communities, Ellicott City, River Hill, and Maple Lawn, along with the various smaller communities of Western Howard County. It’s perfectly possible that candidates could pitch themselves as representing one of those distinct areas (for example, a candidate specifically focusing on the Maple Lawn/Fulton area).

As for the concern about high-density areas controlling the agenda, areas with more population will always have more voting power and consequently more representation at the county council. See for example the current council, in which there are four council members representing relative populous and high density areas and only one representing the lower-density and less populous rural West.

Wouldn’t having a fifteen-member county council at least double or triple the meeting length? Would council members still be able to stay part time?

Baltimore city has a fifteen-member city council. We can look to them to see what to do (or not to do) to efficiently conduct council business. I suspect one approach will be to do what other larger legislatures do, namely to delegate some matters to committees, with the full council needing to get involved only at later stages.

If the goal of expanding the council is to enable council members to be better serve their constituents, couldn’t that be accomplished more cheaply and effectively just by increasing the number of staff members assisting each member?

Serving a constituent is not the same as representing a constituent. A progressive Democrat in District 5 may be served by their Republican council member, and served well at that, but may not feel represented by them. Ditto for a conservative Republican in other districts in which Democratic candidates invariably win.

Questions about ranked choice voting

In ranked choice voting how do you determine which excess ballots get transferred from a candidate that wins election to another candidate?

Per the FairVote advocacy site: “[Vote transfers] can be done many different ways, but the best way is to transfer a fraction of every vote to its next choice. That way, every vote is treated equally and no part of any vote is wasted.” So if a candidate is (say) 20% above the quota of first-preference votes, you take the second preference votes for everybody who voted for that candidate, multiply them by 0.2, and add these fractional votes to each of the candidates receiving the transfers.

How do you resolve the fact that whether Candidate A or Candidate B wins a seat may depend on whether a much lower ranked Candidate C gets more votes than Candidate D?

How do we resolve the fact that in the 1992 presidential election Bill Clinton won with a minority of the vote, due in large part to Ross Perot taking a large percentage of the vote away from George H. W. Bush, when it’s quite possible that most Perot voters would have preferred Bush to Clinton?

Any electoral system used in a race with more than two candidates has theoretical cases where it will fail to adhere to some set of reasonable criteria. (There’s even a mathematical theorem about this.) But how often do these situations occur in practice? Ranked choice voting with multi-member districts has been used for a long time in Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular (under the name “proportional representation with a single transferable vote,” or PR-STV) and to my knowledge has not experienced major issues of the type described.

It’s also important to look at the overall effect of a given electoral system. I dislike the “first past the post” electoral system (the one used in the US) not because of the results of a single presidential race, but because as a general tendency it tends to lead to the dominance of two political parties and the crowding out of independents and third parties, and because when used in multi-member districts it tends to produce one-party dominance at the expense of proportional representation. If ranked choice voting can help correct that then I think the occasional odd result is bearable.

Why wouldn’t parties at least run five candidates for five districts?

The problem here is as follows: When a party runs too many candidates relative to their vote share, it will likely find that none of the candidates get enough first-preference votes to be elected in the first round.

For example, in a five-member district using RCV the quota is approximately 16.7%. If Democrats had (say) a 60% vote share and first preference votes were spread relatively evenly among five Democratic candidates, each would receive about 12% of first preference votes, and would therefore fail to be elected in the first round (which requires exceeding the quota).

One might say, “well, they can be still be elected on transferred votes.” But the question then becomes, where are those transferred votes going to come from? In the second round the only source of transfers would be from winning candidates in the first round who have excess votes (i.e., above the 16.7% quota), or from a last-place candidate eliminated because no candidate met the quota.

But in our example no Democrats won in the first round, so there would be no excess votes to transfer from them. And if a candidate was eliminated, there are two possibilities: 1) The eliminated candidate was either a Republican or third-party candidate, which may not result in any transfers to Democrats. This would leave all of the Democratic candidates still below the quota. 2) The eliminated candidate was a Democratic candidate, in which case the Democratic party’s goal of electing five candidates has failed at the starting gate.

The second and subsequent rounds can be similarly analyzed. Such an analysis raises two questions: 1) If in the scenario described it’s very likely that at least one Democratic candidate will be eliminated, and possibly more than one, what was the point in running five candidates in the first place? 2) What happens if some people voting for Democratic candidates just mark a first-preference vote for their favorite candidate and don’t indicate second, third, etc., preferences? Then even after a Democratic candidate is eliminated there may not be enough second preference votes for other Democratic candidates available to make up the shortfall for another Democratic candidate.

Exploring the full ramifications of running too many candidates would take too long for this post. Suffice to say that I have read a lot of material about real-life RCV elections, and everything I have read is consistent with the view it is a potentially disastrous strategy for a party to field many more candidates than their vote share would warrant.

It seems really easy for a voter to accidentally mark two third choice candidates. Does this spoil the entire ballot?

It does indeed. The possibility of users making errors on ranked choice ballots is a real one. Opponents of ranked choice voting point to rates of spoiled or rejected ballots as high as 10% or more in past US elections using RCV.

This problem can be addressed through a combination of proper ballot design, voter education, and voter experience in using RCV. In the 2020 Irish general election the rate of spoiled ballots was only 0.8%. This is comparable to the rate of ballot spoilage and rejection for absentee and mail-in ballots in the 2020 US election, which per Ballotpedia was also 0.8%.

The New York City Democratic primary was conducted using ranked choice voting, and it took a long time to get the results. Is this an inherent problem with RCV?

The problems in New York City appear to be in large part due to inexperience and possibly outright incompetence on the part of the NYC elections board. However, there is one inherent issue with ranked choice voting that can in fact delay announcement of results:

As previously noted, key to ranked choice voting is the concept of the quota, which for a five-member district is defined as one-sixth of the total number of votes, plus one. But that means that in order to compute the quota you first need to know the total number of votes, and that means that you have to have all the votes in hand first before you can starting calculating results.

That’s not that big an issue for votes cast on election day. But what about mail-in ballots? Maryland’s current rules for mail-in voting allow up to ten days after election day for mail-in ballots to be received. If mail-in ballots are a significant fraction of the total vote then with an RCV election it might take several days after election day for there to be even preliminary results.¹

Why didn’t you consider using approval voting? Or a party slate system? These don’t have the problems that ranked choice voting does.

There are multiple answers here. First, my primary goal was to look at a system that both reduced the number of districts (to reduce the potential for gerrymandering) and provided representation for political parties and other groups commensurate with their voting power. That naturally led me to look at ranked choice voting, and having software (i.e., Auto-Redistrict) that could compute district maps under those assumptions sealed the deal.

Other systems may not necessarily address the goals I have. For example, approval voting (in which each voter can indicate multiple candidates that have their approval) is worth looking at when electing a council member in a single-member district. However when applied to a multi-member district, at least in its simplest form, it can behave like traditional at-large voting and thwart proportional representation.

For example, suppose that we use the simple rule that in a five member district the five candidates receiving the most approvals will be elected. If Democrats form the majority, if all Democratic voters approve all Democratic candidates, and if no Democratic voters approve Republican or third-party candidates, then all five Democratic candidates will be ranked in the top five based on the number of approvals, and all five will be elected.

I think it’s definitely worth considering other election systems for use in Howard County. But—not to brag or anything—I put a lot of work into my analysis of ranked choice voting in the context of Howard County Council elections, and I’d like to see a similar amount of work put into evaluating any suggested alternatives.

As mentioned above, I’ll update this post as appropriate. But in the meantime I’m coming to the end of the series, with my next (and final) post discussing why I think this general issue is so important.

For further exploration

The following may be of interest:

• The Wikipedia article on the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system contains a discussion of how vote transfers can be done. (STV is an older term for ranked choice voting.)
• Ballotpedia summarizes various arguments for and against ranked choice voting.
• The Center for Election Science, an organization supportive of approval voting, argues for it over ranked choice voting. Note that their analysis appears to assume that only a single candidate will win election, and if so is not necessarily applicable to multi-member districts like those I’ve proposed.
• FairVote, an organization supportive of ranked choice voting, argues for it over approval voting.

[This is part 5 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to this one.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I present the results of the automated redistricting I did using the Auto-Redistrict software to draw district lines for a fifteen-member Howard County Council elected in three districts using ranked choice voting.

What might the new districts look like?

The map above shows the three districts produced by the Auto-Redistrict software based on the data and options I provided. The new districts divide the county into the following areas:

• Southeastern Howard County, including Savage, North Laurel, most of east Columbia south of Route 175, and most of west Columbia except the Village of River Hill.
• Northeastern Howard County, including Elkridge, Ellicott City south of Route 40, and east Columbia north of Route 175.
• Western Howard County, including Ellicott City north of Route 40, Maple Lawn, and the Village of River Hill in Columbia.

Based on the 2020 Census figures, the racial and ethnic groups in these three districts would break down as follows:

• Northeast District. Non-Hispanic Whites would be a minority in this district, at 46%. Non-Hispanic Blacks and Asians would form roughly equal parts of the population at 18% and 21% respectively. People of Hispanic origin would be about half those percentages at 9%, and multi-racial people or people of other races would be the smallest group, at 6%.
• Southeast District. The population of non-Hispanic Whites in this district would be even lower, at 40%, with Blacks at about three-quarters of the White population, at 29%. The population of Asians and people of Hispanic origin would be roughly comparable at 13% and 11 % respectively, with multiracial people or people of other races again the smallest group, at 7%.
• West District. This is the only district in which non-Hispanic Whites would form a majority, at 54%. At 26% Asians would have almost as significant a presence in this district as Blacks would in the Southeast District. The population of Blacks would be the smallest of any of the three districts, at 10%. Finally, the populations of people of Hispanic origin and of multiracial people or people of other races would be relatively small, at 5% each.

For Howard County as a whole the breakdown of groups is as follows: 8% persons of Hispanic origin, with the remaining (non-Hispanic) population 47% White, 20% Asian, 19% Black, and 5% multiracial, with the number of American Indians, native Hawaiians, and people of other races negligible.

(The breakdown for those 18 years of age or older is similar but leans slightly whiter: 7% Hispanic origin, 51% White, 19% Asian, 18% Black, 3% multiracial, and the remaining groups negligible. I used total population figures with Auto-Redistrict because many of those under the age of 18 will become voters over the next ten years.)

The task of estimating the number of council members from the various racial or ethnic groups is complicated by several factors. One is that the “Asian” category encompasses both East Asians (e.g., Korean- or Chinese-Americans) and South Asians (e.g., Indian-Americans or Pakistani-Americans), and it can’t be assumed that they would vote in similar ways. Another is that it’s not clear who exactly comprises the group of multi-racial voters, and how they might vote.

Having said that, my guess is that under the proposed council district scheme that Blacks and Asians would be represented on the county council in rough proportion to their presence in the population. For example, there would likely be one Black council member from the Northeast District, and at least one and possibly two Black council members from the Southeast District. There would also likely be an Asian council member from the West District, and possibly one each from the Northeast and Southeast Districts.

How would Democratic and Republican candidates fare in each district, and what might the final makeup of the Howard County Council look like? When ranked choice voting is used in a five-member district, a candidate is automatically elected if they are selected as the first preference on just over one-sixth of the ballots cast, or about 16.7% of those voting. (This number is known as the threshold or quota.)

So, for example, in the precincts comprising the Northeast District I estimated the Republican share of the total vote for Howard County Council in the 2018 general election at about 34%. If a single Republican candidate ran in the Northeast District they would pretty much be guaranteed to be designated as the most preferred candidate by at least 16.7% of voters. The Republican Party would thus have one “safe” seat in the Northeast District.

On the other hand, for the precincts in the Northeast District I estimated the Democratic share of the county council vote in 2018 at about 66%. Suppose that only three Democratic candidates ran in the Northeast District and they each received roughly equal shares of the first preference votes—in other words, about a third of Democratic voters picked the first candidate as their most preferred candidate, about a third of Democrats gave their first preference to the second candidate, and about a third of Democrats gave their first preference to the third candidate.¹

Then given a 66% Democratic vote share each candidate would be designated as the most preferred candidate by about 22% of voters, well over the quota of 16.7%, and all would automatically be elected. The Democratic Party would thus have three “safe” seats in the Northeast District.

What about the remaining seat? Suppose that the Republican Party ran two candidates, the Democratic Party ran four, and each candidate received first preference votes from a roughly equal share of their own party’s voters. Then each Republican candidate would receive about 17% of first preference votes (34% divided by two), and each Democratic candidate would receive about 16.5% of the first preference votes (66% divided by four).

Since all six candidates would be close to the threshold value of 16.7%, and they could not all be elected, it would be a toss-up as to whether the Democrats or Republicans would win the fifth and final seat after accounting for all the second, third, etc., preferences expressed by voters.²

A similar analysis can be done for the other two districts. A summary of the likely results is as follows:

• Northeast District: Party breakdown: 66% Democrats, 34% Republicans. Likely three safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat, and one toss-up.
• Southeast District: Party breakdown: 75% Democrats, 25% Republicans. Likely three safe Democratic seats, one safe Republican seat, and one leaning Democratic.
• West District: Party breakdown: 53% Democrats, 47% Republicans. Likely two safe Democratic seats, two safe Republican seats, and one leaning Democratic—albeit only slightly.

Overall with this district map and the use of ranked choice voting Democrats would likely win at least eight seats on the Howard County Council and Republicans at least four. The remaining three seats would be in play, with the most likely result being a 9–6 or 10–5 Democratic majority—a significantly more balanced result than the 4–1 Democratic majority on the current council. (And as noted previously it’s also possible that a third party or independent candidate could capture a seat and act as a deciding vote on the council.)

In my next post I attempt to answer various questions that have been raised regarding this particular proposal and regarding ranked choice voting in general.

For further exploration

For the code used to generate the graphs above, see my document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 3. For the data behind the district maps see Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1.

[This is part 4 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In the first post in this series I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss how to draw district lines for the proposed three districts, with ranked choice voting used to elect five members in each district.

Automated redistricting for everyone

At present the boundaries of the five Howard County Council districts are created and proposed by an appointed redistricting commission, and then adopted by the county council. Each of the two parties appoints an equal number of candidates for the commission and the county council appoints the chair of the commission.

In practice the district boundaries are actually drawn by computer, with each of the two parties using redistricting software to draw potential districts so as to favor their own cause. Since Democrats currently have a majority on the county council, the district boundaries adopted will be those that help get Democrats elected to the council.

Ordinary voters and third parties have little or no influence over this process: the rules are designed to exclude third parties from the redistricting commission, and access to redistricting software has traditionally been restricted to the two major parties.

However there’s no longer any reason (other than inertia and a desire to maintain control) for county council redistricting to be done in this way. Any interested person can now download free software that can automate the process of redrawing district boundaries. They can also download the data that’s required as input to the redistricting software, including population data derived from the US Census, digital maps of precinct boundaries, and past election results. Armed with this software and data they can create their own proposed districts.

That’s exactly what I’ve done for this series of posts. I used the Auto-Redistrict software (created by Kevin Baas), in large part because it supports creation of multi-member districts elected using ranked choice voting. Not only is it free but its source code is also available, so that the way it works can be inspected for correctness and potential biases.

Running Auto-Redistrict to create a three-district map

As input to the program I used the public data released by the Maryland Department of Planning after each decennial census for use in Congressional redistricting. The data files include precinct boundaries and populations for each precinct, including population figures broken down by race and ethnicity to help ensure that districts are not drawn to disadvantage particular minority groups.¹

I also used as input to the program the public data on election results released by the Maryland Board of Elections. This can be used to help ensure that districts are not drawn to disadvantage particular political parties. In this case I used results from the 2018 general elections for Howard County Council, since those are the results most relevant for county council redistricting.

(Since there was no Republican candidate in District 3, I estimated the potential vote share for a hypothetical Republican candidate in that district. I also did further estimation to account for early voting and absentee voting, which are not reflected in the official precinct-level results.)

The Auto-Redistrict program allows you to tweak various parameters representing various trade-offs between different goals: for example, how important is it that the districts’ populations be as equal as possible, or that districts be as compact as possible? In my case I used all the default settings.

Howard County has over a hundred precincts. The number of ways in which those precincts could be combined to form three districts is much too large for a person to check each possible district map, and even too large for computers. The Auto-Redistrict software therefore takes a different approach: it generates a set of random maps, evaluates them according to the various criteria being used (compactness, competitiveness, etc.), and then selects the best maps to be carried forward. It then mimics biological evolution, creating a new set of maps by combining different maps together to form new ones, while also introducing some random changes (analogous to mutations).

This process—evaluating maps, picking the best ones, using them to create new maps, and then repeating the evaluation—continues until the generated maps become more and more alike, representing the “best of the best” in terms of meeting the desired criteria. In my case I stopped the program after over eight thousand iterations and went with the last map produced. Using a modern laptop the whole process took about half an hour from start to finish.

“Automated” doesn’t mean “nonpolitical”

Having extolled the virtues of using software to automate the process of doing redistricting, I now have to stop and issue a caution: just because the process can be automated using software designed to handle the mathematics doesn’t mean that we can simply “leave it to the mathematicians”. There are multiple aspects of automated redistricting that entail decisions that are political in nature.

That means in turn that an inclusive approach to redistricting requires the inclusion not just of people who can run software like Auto-Redistrict, but also of people who can question the assumptions and data that go into the software, as well as the results that come out of it. Hence my suggestion that redistricting needs to be overseen by an independent commission that is (as much as possible) designed to be nonpartisan and representative of all the major groups with a stake in the results.

As but one example, I made a judgement call when deciding what party-related data to include in the input to Auto-Redistrict. In particular, I chose to use only the results of the 2018 county council races, and did not use the results of the 2018 county executive race (which had a higher vote share for Republicans). Others may quibble with that decision.

I also haven’t considered using detailed voter registration data (e.g., registered Democrats vs. registered Republicans in each precinct). To my knowledge that data is not fully publicly available, so if I were able to obtain detailed voter registration data I would not have been able to present my analysis in a fully public and transparent manner. Making that trade-off is, again, an inherently political decision: should I have prioritized possibly doing a better job of drawing maps at the expense of excluding people without access to the same data?

Other decisions are involved in how redistricting software like Auto-Redistrict is configured to run. For example, I chose the default settings when prioritizing geometrical considerations like compactness of districts against considerations of fairness like balancing party, racial, or ethnic vote shares. Perhaps others might have had different priorities. Again, these become political decisions, and should not simply be left to the “experts” to decide.

So what I’ve done here in running Auto-Redistrict for my proposed fifteen-member three-district county council shouldn’t be construed as a perfect effort, not to be questioned, or even as the best that could possibly be done. It’s just one example out of many possible ones. In any case, in the next post I’ll present my particular results.

For further exploration

For more information on attempts to take redistricting out of the control of legislative bodies and put it in the hands of independent redistricting commission see:

• “Independent and Advisory Citizen Redistricting Commissions” is a list of links to information about states that have reformed redistricting to one extent or another.

For more on drawing district boundaries using computer sofware see:

• The Auto-Redistrict web site has more information about how the software works and how to run it.
• My document Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1, discusses creating the input data that Auto-Redistrict uses (Howard County precinct maps combined with demographic data and election results). It includes a detailed discussion of the measures I took to select particular data to be considered, and to estimate data where it was not available for one reason or another.
• My video “Howard County Council Redistricting with Auto-Redistrict” demonstrates how to run Auto-Redestrict to generate a district map for the proposed expanded Howard County Council.

[This is part 3 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In my first post I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss why ranked choice voting is a better way to elect five members in each of the three proposed districts.

Why ranked choice voting?

If we want to have only three districts, with five members in each, and we don’t want to elect members using at-large voting within each district, how should we elect each district’s members? My proposal is to use ranked choice voting.

Using ranked choice voting in a multi-member district (like the three districts proposed here) helps ensure that elections are fair for all voters, and that each voter has an equal chance to make their votes matter. It allows voters the option to rank candidates in order of preference: one, two, three, and so forth. If a particular person’s vote cannot help their top choice win, that vote counts for their next choice.

The image above shows a sample ballot for a hypothetical Howard County Council election for the West District (as discussed in a future post) conducted using ranked choice voting. Here the voter, a progressive Democrat, indicated Democrat candidate Alice Doe as being her first preference, but then has marked Emily Zhang of the Green party as her second preference, ahead of the other Democratic candidates. She then marked Democrats Latoya Green and Sanjeev Patel as her third and fourth preferences, and then marked the other candidates as her fifth, sixth, etc., preferences.

Note that there is no requirement that the voter indicate a preference for all six candidates; she could have just stopped after marking her ballot for the three Democratic candidates and Emily Zhang. However, it may be that some of the Republican candidates are more acceptable to her than others, so she may want to give them preference ahead of other candidates. She may also dislike libertarians on general principle, so takes care to mark the Libertarian party candidate as least preferred.

(Note that there are only three Democratic candidates and three Republican candidates on the ballot. You may wonder, why wouldn’t the two parties put forth five candidates each, given that there would be five open seats? That’s because in ranked choice voting it doesn’t make sense for a party to put more candidates on the ballot than that party’s expected share of voters would warrant. I’ll discuss this in more depth in a future post, but will note for now that in this example district Democrats and Republicans are evenly matched.)

In a five-member district like the hypothetical Howard County West District in this example, there would be a 16.7% “quota” for election.¹ If more than 16.7% of ballots cast marked a particular candidate as their first preference then that candidate would be automatically elected. Any of those votes that they received from voters in excess of the quota would be transferred to other candidates, more specifically the candidates named by their voters as their second preferences.²

In our example suppose that Democratic candidates Alice Doe and Sanjeev Patel had enough first preference votes to win outright in the first round of county. (In other words, they both got more than a 16.7% share of all first preference votes cast.) If enough Doe or Patel voters followed our example voter and indicated a second preference vote for Emily Zhang of the Green party, the excess votes for Doe and Patel (i.e., above the quota) could help elect Emily Zhang in the second round of counting, after all excess voters were transferred to other candidates.

More specifically, if Zhang did not have enough votes in the first round of counting to exceed the quota, she might have enough votes in the second round to exceed the quota, by virtue of votes transferred to her because Alice Doe and Sanjeev Patel didn’t need the votes, and their voters marked Zhang as their second preference. Zhang would then be deemed elected in the second round of counting. (The colloquial term for this is “getting in on transfers.”)

Other candidates could benefit from this as well. For example, if Republican Joe Jones were elected with first preference votes in the first round of counting, and he were the only Republican candidate to be elected in that first round, his excess votes (above the quota) could end up being transferred to Elana Garcia or Christopher Park.

On the other hand, suppose that after excess votes from the first round were transferred to other candidates, there were still no candidates with votes in excess of the 16.7% quota. In that case the candidate with the least amount of votes would be eliminated, and their votes would be transferred to others according to their voters’ preferences. So, for example, if Emily Zhang were in last place after the second round of county, any votes assigned to her after the first round would be transfered to other candidates (probably Democratic candidates) heading into the third round of counting.`

Vote tabulation would proceed in this manner round by round, transferring votes from successful candidates to other candidates, and eliminating last place candidates, until five candidates were elected. (The way in which the quota is defined makes it impossible for more than five candidates to be elected.)

(In some cases voters may not rank all candidates. For example, the voter in the example above may indicate her preferences for Emily Zhang, the Green party candidate, and the three Democratic candidates, but may not indicate her preferences regarding the Republican candidates and Janet Smith, the Libertarian candidate. If so, her ballot will not be considered further once Emily Zhang and the three Democratic candidates are either elected or eliminated; at that point the ballot is said to be “exhausted.”)

Promoting political and ideological diversity

In addition to allowing voters to rank candidates from the two major parties according to the voters’ preferences, ranked choice voting also allows voters to vote for third-party candidates without “wasting” their vote. This can be seen in the example above: even if Emily Zhang was eliminated in the second round of counting, the expressed preferences of voters like our example voter could end up helping to elect other candidates in the third or subsequent round.

As another example, suppose that there were a third party associated with the Democratic Socialists of America. That party could run a DSA-backed candidate in a council district with lots of progressive voters, and encourage those voters to give that candidate their first preference. If the DSA-backed candidate were unsuccessful then their first-preference votes would simply transfer to the candidate (most likely a progressive Democrat) that those voters had marked as their second preference, and could then help that candidate be elected.

The same logic works for independent candidates. For example, if a “Never Trump” conservative couldn’t make it through the local GOP primary then they could run for a county council seat as an independent. If their popularity were high enough then they could potentially attract enough first and second preference votes to be elected in their own right. As with the DSA example above, a Republican voter giving such a candidate their first preference would not be “throwing their vote away,” since they could—and presumably would—designate the official Republican candidates as their second, third, etc., choices.

Promoting racial and ethnic diversity

The same dynamic works for promoting racial and ethnic diversity on the council. For example, a Black Democrat running for the council in a district could appeal to Black Democratic voters to give the candidate their first preference votes, and then to give other Democratic candidates their second preference votes. Such a candidate might also attract second or third preferences from conservative Black voters who might give their first preference votes to Republican candidates.

This would allow Black candidates to leverage Black voter support in all three districts, as opposed to having Black voters be concentrated in a single district.

Similarly, a Korean-American Republican candidate might get first preference votes from Korean-American Republican voters, second preference votes from other Republican voters, and second or third preference votes from Korean-American independents or even Democrats who wanted to see some Korean representation on the county council.

To repeat, in none of these cases would voters be “wasting” their votes on a candidate with marginal prospects. They could vote according to their own heart’s desires, secure in the knowledge that their preferences would be reflected in the final results one way or another.

So, let’s assume that we have three council districts with five members each, and that we’d elect those members using ranked choice voting within each district. How could we draw district lines in a way that would reflect the racial, ethnic, and political diversity of Howard County, be open and transparent, and could be justified to the voters and candidates who participate in the resulting elections? That will be the topic of my next post.

For further exploration

For more on the topic of ranked choice voting see the following:

• FairVote is an advocacy site for ranked choice voting. Its recent report “Ranked Choice Voting Elections Benefit Candidates and Voters of Color” and its analysis of the use of ranked choice voting in the 2021 New York City primaries are particularly relevant to my comments above regarding promoting more diversity on the Howard County Council.
• The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center has more in-depth information, including a detailed discussion of issues relevant to election administrators.

For a more detailed discussion of how ranked choice voting might work in the context of a Howard County Council election, see my 2012 post “Electing a council that reflects Howard County, part 1” and its followup post. These were written for the case of electing the five current Howard County Council members by ranked choice voting, but they are also relevant to the problem of electing five council members in a single district of the proposed three. (Note that the posts refer to ranked choice voting using the alternative name “Single Transferable Vote” or “STV.”)

[This is part 2 of a seven-part series. See also part 1, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

In my previous post I proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the way we elect the Howard County Council:

1. Expand the council from five to fifteen members.
2. Reduce the number of council districts from five to three.
3. Elect five members in each district using ranked choice voting.
4. Draw the district lines using an automated process overseen by an independent nonpartisan commission.

In this post I discuss why having three districts is better than having fifteen districts (or no districts at all) when it comes to promoting diversity on the Howard County Council.

Why three council districts? Why not fifteen?

Why reduce the number of council districts from five to three? With fifteen council members shouldn’t we have fifteen council districts?

The first problem is that electing one council member in each of fifteen districts can dilute the voting power of minorities. Look at the graph above, which shows the population percentages for various racial and ethnic groups within an example set of fifteen council districts. (The associated district map was drawn by the same automated system described in the next post.)

As of the 2020 Census non-Hispanic Whites make up less then half of Howard County’s population, but they would still form the largest voting bloc in thirteen of the fifteen example districts. There is only one example district in which Blacks would form the largest voting bloc, and only one in which Asians would.

If such a map were to be adopted, and if voters tended to vote for people of their own race or ethnic group, the result would likely be a White-dominated council, similar to what’s been the historical norm in Howard County. It’s possible that there might be only one Black council member out of fifteen (down from one in five currently), and only one Asian council member.

Creative drawing of district lines could “solve” this problem, by lumping minority populations into a few select districts where they might have a chance of electing one of their own. But this would be at the expense of minority voters in other districts. (This is similar to the situation with the current council districts, in which Black candidates have been elected in District 2 but not in any other districts.)

The same techniques used to draw district lines to favor particular racial or ethnic groups also can be—and have been—used to favor one political party over another. This brings us to the second problem:

Drawing district lines for fifteen districts is a lot of work compared to drawing them for five districts, and offers more opportunities for partisan gerrymandering and endless political fights over redistricting. The process of Howard County Council redistricting is contentious enough—I literally wrote the book on this—so why make it even more divisive and time consuming than it already is? The fewer districts, the less opportunity for gerrymandering.

Howard County originally had five council members representing the entire county, with no councilmanic districts. Howard County now has over three times the population as it did then. So you can think of the proposed scheme as a return to the county council’s roots, with each of the three districts being comparable in population to Howard County fifty years ago, and each district having five council members representing it, just as Howard County as a whole did back then.

But . . . the original Howard County Council elections had a fatal flaw, one which we need not and should not replicate. I discuss that in the next section.

Why not elect council members at-large?

OK, so having fifteen districts may not be a good idea. Why not eliminate districts altogether, and elect all fifteen council members in county-wide at-large elections? Or have three districts as suggested, with five members chosen in at-large elections in each district? Or have a smaller number of districts (say, nine or ten) and then elect the remaining members at large, similar to how Howard County Board of Education elections work?

The problem here is that at-large elections can entrench the dominance of majorities and work against minorities: since voters can vote for multiple candidates, and the candidates with the most votes win, if a 51% majority votes as a unified bloc for a slate of at-large candidates, they can succeed in having all of their candidates being elected. The 49% minority would then have no representaion at all.

This is not just a theoretical concern. It’s exactly what happened in Howard County in the first years after it moved to a council form of government: Because all five members were elected at-large, and because Democrats formed a majority of voters (in large part due to the establishment and growth of Columbia), the council was dominated by Democrats. In fact, at one point there was no Republican council member at all.

The same thing would happen with an expanded fifteen-member council elected in at-large elections. In fact, it would likely be even worse than in the 1970s because the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans is much larger now.

The push to switch the Howard County Council from at-large elections to elections by district came mainly from the Republican party, because Republicans were under such a disadvantage in at-large elections. But election by districts is not a panacea for Republican concerns, especially when the number of districts is large.

Suppose we abandon the idea of electing fifteen council members in county-wide at-large elections and go back to the idea of electing one council member in each of fifteen districts. Republican candidates would then be severely disadvantaged if we used our hypothetical example set of fifteen districts (which was created by an automated system designed to minimize partisan advantages).

Although there’s a substantial body of Republican voters across the county, as shown in the graph above there is only one district out of the example fifteen districts in which Republican voters would form a clear majority, and only one other district where their numbers would be comparable to Democratic voters. (This is based on estimates derived from the 2018 county council elections.)

If there were only three districts, and members were chosen at-large in each district, the Republican party would still have the problem of majority dominance. There are so many Democrats relative to Republicans that it would probably be possible to draw district lines such that all three districts had Democratic majorities. Using at-large elections to elect five council members within each district would allow those majorities to elect full slates of Democratic candidates in those districts, again locking Republicans out of county council representation.

So if we want to have only three districts, with five members in each, and we don’t want to elect members using at-large voting within each district, how should we elect each district’s members? That’s the topic of my next post.

For further exploration

For the numbers and code behind the graphs above showing the racial, ethnic, and party breakdowns for a hypothetical fifteen districts, as well as the generated fifteen-district map, see “Howard County Council Expansion, Part 2.”

[This is part 1 of a seven-part series. See also part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7. I also wrote a follow-up post that can be viewed as an alternative to part 5.]

Howard County is too big for its county council

For over fifty years now Howard County, Maryland, has been governed by a five-member county council and a county executive.¹ In those fifty years Howard County has grown from about sixty thousand people to well over three hundred thousand, more than five times as many people as when its first county council was sworn in.

In 2019 the Howard County Charter Review Commission recommended expanding the size of the county council from five members to seven. This was a relatively minor change, but one which seemingly did not attract any support from the county executive, the county council, or—for that matter—anybody else. So why am I writing about this topic now?

Because I don’t think the Charter Review Commission was being bold enough in its recommendations. Even I wasn’t being bold enough in my previous post recommending a move to ranked choice voting for either a five- or seven-member council.

I believe that the structure of the County Council needs a more thoroughgoing reform in order to bring it closer to the people of Howard County, better reflect the preferences of county voters, and potentially reduce political polarization that can bleed over into other areas, most notably the Board of Education.

So in line with the motto “go big or go home” I’m coming back with an even bolder four point recommendation:

1. Triple the size of the Howard County Council, expanding it from five members to fifteen.

2. At the same time, reduce the number of council districts from five to three, with five council members elected from each district.

3. Elect each district’s council members using ranked choice voting, in which each voter would list the candidates they want to see elected, in order of preference.

4. Establish a nonpartisan commission to draw the district lines using a process that takes into account various criteria important in redistricting—creating compact and contiguous districts with equal populations, not diluting the voting power of minorities, and ensuring competitive races not marred by partisan gerrymandering—with all code, data, and background assumptions made publicly available.

In this post I address the first part of this proposal, namely expanding the Howard County Council.

Why fifteen council members?

Why expand the Howard County Council? First, to provide better service to county residents. When the Howard County Council was first established there was one council member for every twelve thousand people or so. Now each council member serves almost seventy thousand people, a number that makes it more difficult for a council member to attend to the needs of any given constituent.

As the graph above shows, Howard County is in the top five of Maryland juridictions when it comes to population per council member or county commissioner. The average ratio for all Maryland counties and Baltimore city is thirty-six thousand people per member. The median ratio is twenty-two thousand people per council member. (Half of all counties have a higher ratio than the median, and half a lower ratio.)

Note that Baltimore city, despite having a population considerably larger than Howard County, has a ratio of population to council member that is significantly lower than Howard County. That’s because Baltimore city has a fifteen-member city council, compared to Howard County’s five-member county council.

How big should the Howard County Council be? Increasing the council by only two members, as the Charter Review Commission recommended, would in my opinion just be putting a bandage on the problem without really solving it. On the other hand, if we wanted to keep the ratio of constituents to council members the same as in the late 1960s we’d need a council of twenty-five to thirty members. That’s a lot: I’m not sure the council chambers in the George E. Howard building has enough room to hold that many council members.²

Let’s consider an intermediate approach, increasing the size of the Howard County from five to fifteen members to match the size of the Baltimore city council. That would lower the ratio of population to council members from the current sixty-six thousand to a third of that value, or twenty-two thousand people per council member. This would match the current median value for Maryland, and be comparable to the ratios for St. Mary’s County and Allegany County.

Of course Howard County is still growing in population, so this ratio would degrade over time. However a fifteen-member council should be large enough to suffice for most if not all of the twenty-first century without requiring any further expansion.³

Enabling more people to serve Howard County

Increasing the size of the Howard County Council also provides more opportunities for up-and-coming community activists and politicians to serve the county—and we have a lot more qualified candidates than there were in the late 1960s. Consider the picture above: of the many Howard County Democratic activists attending this dinner, surely more than a handful would be interested in making a future run for the Howard County Council and would make good candidates and council members.

If we have a lot more people qualified to run for elected positions but the number of positions doesn’t change, that leads to increasingly contentious, expensive, and partisan elections—something we see in the US at the national level, as more and more people compete for a limited number of Congressional seats.

The large number of qualified candidates can also lead to ostensibly nonpartisan elected positions becoming bones of partisan contention, as with the Howard County Board of Education: thwarted by the lack of openings on the Howard County Council, ambitious political activists can try to use the Board of Education as a springboard to future runs for the county council or other positions.

As a result Board of Education elections may become increasingly partisan affairs, featuring explicit party endorsements and people voting for candidates based primarily on their political affilations. Expanding the county council could help reduce this incentive.⁴

Let’s assume that there’s a consensus on expanding the Howard County Council, and that having fifteen council members is the desired council size. How should the county be divided into districts, and how should council members from each district be elected? That’s the subject of my next post.

For further exploration

For a discussion of the need to expand legislative bodies, in this case the US House of Representatives, see:

• “America Needs a Bigger House” by the New York Times editorial board.
• “Congress Needs to Be Way, Way Bigger” by David Litt in The Atlantic.

For commentary about increasing partisanship in Howard County Board of Education races see:

• “Will Partisan Politics Make The Howard County Public School System No Longer The Best In The State?” by Scott Ewart at Scott E Blog.
• “What’s at Stake in the Increasingly Politicized Howard County Board of Education Elections” by Jeremy Dommu at The Merriweather Post.
• “Partisan school board elections erode trust” by Robert Miller (letter to the editors of the Baltimore Sun).

For the numbers and code behind the graph above showing the population per council member or county commissioner, see “Howard County Council Expansion, Part 1.”

For Americans today is the first day of what is hoped to be a better year than 2020. For residents of the United Kingdom it also marks another milestone: the first day after the end of the eleven-month transition period after the UK’s formal exit from the European Union.

To be pedantic, “Brexit” in the strict sense occurred on January 31, 2020. However during the transition period the UK was still effectively treated as a member of the EU for matters relating to trade in goods and services; the idea was that this would allow time for the UK and EU to negotiate a formal agreement on their relationship going forward. So January 1, 2021, is the day from which Brexit has real consequences for British companies and consumers.

I previously wrote a post “Boy’s Own Brexit” about the various commentators I was reading to keep up with Brexit-related developments. I thought it worth doing a quick update on the current state of play, and offering a few thoughts for the future.

Getting Brexit done

The first person I highlighted in my original post was Sir Ivan Rogers, formerly British Permanent Representative to the EU before he resigned in protest of then Prime Minister Theresa May’s handling of the Brexit process. He seems to have been relatively silent lately, though I did find some comments from him quoted in the British press regarding the past year’s negotiations between the UK and EU regarding their future relationship. Rogers thought that the present PM, Boris Johnson, would walk away from the transition period negotiations and have the UK do a “no deal” Brexit.

Rogers was wrong about this: Boris Johnson did in fact conclude an agreement with the EU, albeit at almost the very last minute. (The announcement was made on Christmas Eve, and the agreement itself signed by Johnson on December 30.) That agreement is less a final dispensation than an agreement to continue negotiating: to a large degree the agreement itself kicks the can down the road, deferring final decisions on a wide range of matters to a set of joint intergovernmental bodies to be established by the two parties.

However I doubt that this really matters to Boris Johnson, and that’s why I think Rogers so misread him. As a politician Johnson deals in slogans and broad brush pronouncements, and seemingly pays little or no attention to the details of policies until and unless they’re relevant to his own political fortunes. (In this Johnson has been compared to Donald Trump.) Johnson was chosen as leader of the Conservative Party, and the Conservatives were victorious in the most recent general election, on a pledge to “get Brexit done,” with no real definition as to what that would actually mean in practice.

So it was presumably important to Johnson that there be a UK-EU agreement, and that he be seen as “standing up for Britain” by stretching negotiations out as long as possible, but the actual details of the agreement were of secondary importance to him. All that was important was that his political allies and the Tory-sympathetic press hail it as freeing the UK from domination by the EU, which is apparently exactly what has happened.

This strategy of focusing on the slogans and not discussing the details was the same as that followed by the “Leave” side in the original 2016 EU referendum. Not coincidentally, the person most identified with that strategy, Dominic Cummings, was also closely involved in the Conservative Party’s campaign strategy in the December 2019 election. A decisive victory in that election allowed Boris Johnson to continue as Prime Minister (after previously taking over from Theresa May), and Cummings continued as Johnson’s key advisor.

However this was presumably only a marriage of convenience. Cummings has made no secret of his contempt for the upper class Eton- and Oxbridge-educated politicians who have traditionally ruled Britain, and Boris Johnson is a very pure example of the type. Johnson most likely did not give a fig about Cummings’s dreams of reforming the Whitehall bureacracy and the British educational system, and building a 21st century British economy based on AI, genetic engineering, and other scientific and technological advances.

Cummings found himself under widespread criticism for flouting COVID-19 travel restrictions (thus committing an advisor’s greatest sin, namely making himself more newsworthy than his boss), and relatively soon after departed Johnson’s circle. He hasn’t posted anything to his blog since a year ago, and I suspect he’ll remain in limbo until and unless he can find another politician willing to use him and be used in turn.

Endless negotiations

Meanwhile Richard North—a “leave” advocate who considers Boris Johnson a liar and a buffoon, and equally despises Dominic Cummings—continues his daily chronicling of Brexit-related news and views at his EU Referendum site, with articles also posted to the Turbulent Times site, along with those by his son Peter North.

Both North father and son agree that, all things equal, the UK is better off out of the EU. However they also lay great stress on the point that while the UK may be more free to choose which agreements it enters into, and which regulations it chooses to adopt, the reality of 21st century globalization is that both the UK and the EU will need to conform to regulatory frameworks set at a higher level, for example industry-specific standards set by global bodies under United Nations sponsorship.

(Although they lay less stress on this point, it’s also the case that the UK as a relatively small country and economy will be at a disadvantage in negotiating with the major trade blocs, i.e., the US, the EU, and China.)

It’s also arguable whether in leaving the allegedly-undemocratic embrace of the EU, the UK will now be able to decide its fate in a more democratic manner. As the lawyer David Allen Green points out on his own Law and Policy Blog commenting on matters Brexit-related, the just-signed agreement between the UK and the EU actually removes a great many matters from democratic decisions in the UK Parliament, and places them in the hands of the UK government acting as an executive: “whatever is agreed directly between government ministers and Brussels modifies all domestic law automatically, without any parliamentary involvement”. Thus Green claims that rather than the UK “taking back control,” the bill in Parliament implementing the UK-EU agreement “instead shows that Whitehall—that is, ministers and their departments—has taken control of imposing on the United Kingdom what it agrees with Brussels.”

But, again, as many people have commented, Brexit was arguably less about the details of the UK-EU relationship and more an expression of British (or, in some eyes, English) nationalism in opposition to the proto-nationalism of a European Union looking to further political integration of its member states. And that’s not necessarily a problem, at least if we interpret nationalism not as the ethnonationalism it can devolve into, but rather simply as a matter of a country’s residents being proud of their country and wanting it to exercise self-determination in acting to the benefit of its own citizens. In that sense English nationalism is no worse than (say) Irish or Scottish nationalism, to which I now turn.

The Irish question

In my previous post I noted my reading of the Slugger O’Toole blog, seeking insight into the special post-Brexit situation of Northern Ireland, both as the only part of the UK that will share a land border with the (now UK-less) EU, and as a jurisdiction with special status due to its historical conflicts over Protestant-Catholic relations and Irish reunification, a status acknowledged in the Belfast Agreement intended to foster a resolution to those conflicts.

To briefly recap events since I last wrote: Originally due to the Conservative Party’s not quite having a majority in Parliament, the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party held veto power over the UK government’s attempts to “square the circle” between having the UK be able to diverge from EU regulations post-Brexit (as desired by most “leavers,” including the Euroskeptics who were dominant in the DUP) and having a relatively open border between Northern Ireland and (the Republic of) Ireland (as desired by Irish nationalists and allegedly dictated by the Belfast Agreement).

However, in the December 2019 general election the Conservative Party won such a large majority that Boris Johnson no longer needed the votes of DUP MPs, and hence apparently decided to ignore any further demands they might make. Johnson’s decision was to preserve a relatively open land border between Ireland north and south, at the expense of imposing additional customs checks and other regulatory red tape between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK: the so-called “border in the Irish sea.” (A BBC article provides more background on how it all happened.)

Many commenters on Slugger O’Toole and elsewhere believe that this presages even greater integration between Ireland and Northern Ireland, followed by a referendum (or “border poll”) on Irish reunification in which Irish nationalists will be victorious. I think this may well happen, but on a timescale much longer than such people think.

At the moment Northern Irish politics remains dominated by a political stalemate between the DUP and Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that arose out of the Provisional IRA. As a party SF remains toxic to a good number of Irish voters and to other political parties, not just in the north but in the south as well. (As an example, despite winning the most votes in the most recent Irish general election SF could not form a government, since neither of the two parties traditionally dominant in Irish politics, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, would enter into coalition with it.)

Since Sinn Féin is seen as the leading exponent of Irish reunification, both in its own eyes and in others’, the widespread hostility toward it in turn drags down the Irish republican cause in general. Thus rather than dissatisfaction with the status quo and the travails of the DUP and political unionism greatly increasing support for reunification, instead Northern Ireland has seen a rise in “middle ground” politics, exemplified by the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland.

(It’s worth noting in passing that the use of proportional representation with a single transferable vote—what’s known in the US as ranked choice voting—is what allowed Alliance to make headway against the DUP and Sinn Féin, since they are a relatively safe “second choice” for many voters whose first choices were one of the traditional unionist or nationalist parties, in addition to picking up first preference votes on their own.)

Alliance is nominally neutral on the issue of Irish reunification, but in practice this amounts to its trying to make Northern Ireland work given its present status as part of the UK. That stance is matched by that of the present Irish government, a coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which has been soft-pedaling discussions of reunification in favor of a “shared island” approach.

In the end I suspect Irish reunification will not occur until Sinn Féin ceases to be disdained by the majority of voters and by other parties, or until SF ceases to be the main driving force behind reunification. I suspect the former will occur only after the departure from political life (or, for that matter, from life itself) of all Sinn Féin figures who have IRA connections or are otherwise associated with “the Troubles”. The most prominent such figure is Gerry Adams, the previous leader of Sinn Féin who now is seen by many as exercising veto power behind the scenes. At 72 years of age he possibly has another fifteen or twenty years on the scene, which would bring us to 2035–2040.

However even this may not be enough time. As one example, Martina Anderson, former Sinn Féin Member of the European Parliament, was not even born when the Troubles started. She went to prison for IRA activities in 1986 at the age of 18 (eleven years before the final IRA ceasefire in 1997), and given her present age of 58 possibly might have another twenty or even thirty years in public life.

Thus it may not be until 2040–2050 that Sinn Féin finally comes out from under the “shadow of the gunman,” and the legacy of violence committed by the IRA, Protestant loyalists, and the British state ceases to be a factor in voters’ decisions in a reunification referendum. Accordingly I’ll predict the chances of Irish reunification in the next ten years at no more than one in ten.

An independent Scotland?

After English nationalism and Irish nationalism we move to Scottish nationalism. (At present Welsh nationalism is apparently not powerful enough to have any significant implications for the UK as a whole.) Scotland is distinguished from Northern Ireland by having a government led (since 2007) by an explicitly nationalist party (the Scottish National Party) that is dominant both in local elections and in elections for the UK Parliament, and a public that is currently expressing majority support for Scottish independence.

(In the series of polls tracked by James Kelly on his Scot Goes Pop! blog, support for independence has been hovering around the 55% mark, compared to the 45% of voters who voted Yes in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.)

A majority of Scottish voters in the EU referendum voted for the UK to remain in the EU, and any problems seen as resulting from Brexit may increase the number of voters willing to see Scotland leave the UK behind and possibly rejoin the EU as an independent county. However, the SNP and the cause of Scottish independence face two barriers that Irish nationalists do not.

First, there is no equivalent of the Belfast Agreement that gives an external entity (in that case, Ireland) a stake in whether Scotland becomes independent or not. Scottish independence is seen by others as a purely internal matter for the UK to deal with itself.

More importantly, unlike with Northern Ireland the British (or, to be more precise, English) political establishment has a strong interest in keeping Scotland part of the UK, even against the expressed wishes of the Scottish people themselves. Scotland provides the political establishment benefits including revenues from North Sea oil, a place to host the British nuclear deterrent (in the form of submarines and their missiles), and a playground for the upper classes to fish and hunt (like the nobility of old). And, of course, as with any ruling class throughout history, secession of a restive territory is seen as constituting a diminution of the ruling class’s power, and is resisted accordingly.

The UK’s ruling Conservative Party in particular has no motive to hold a second referendum on Scottish independence or, for that matter, to respect the results of a Yes majority voting in such a referendum. The Tories have a comfortable majority in Parliament based almost solely on their performance in England and Wales, and have no need to cater to the desires of the SNP and Scottish voters, a situation which will likely continue through 2024 at least.

If the Labour Party is able to come to power at some point it may be willing to countenance an independence referendum, especially if it needs support from the SNP to form a government. However letting Scotland go would mean the withdrawal of that support, and could put Labour at a permanent disadvantage to the Tories in England and Wales. So while Labour might be coerced into allowing a second referendum on Scottish independence, they might also be unwilling to respect a Yes result, or at least might try to introduce additional delays and difficulties into the process.

Thus while I think there’s a good chance that Scotland will end up as an independent country some day, I put the chances of that happening in the next ten years no higher than 50-50 at best, and probably closer to one in three given the unfavorable political environment at the UK level.

This is however assuming that the process of deciding on independence is dependent on and endorsed by the British government. If the frustration of the Scottish people gets high enough, and the SNP’s current relatively moderate approach loses the party political support in future elections, it’s possible that a future Scottish government (whether SNP-led or not) may issue a unilateral declaration of independence. At that point all bets are off.

Finally, getting back to Brexit: although both Scottish voters and politicians are generally EU supporters, it’s an open question whether an independent Scotland should actually (re)join the EU or not.

Arguably as a country on the northwest fringe of Europe Scotland has more in common with the Nordic countries than it does with core EU members like France and Germany. Of those countries, only Finland is (like Ireland) both a member of the EU and using the euro as its currency. Denmark and Sweden are EU members but not in the Eurozone (and apparently are unlikely to join any time soon), while Norway and Iceland have remained outside the EU.

Instead Norway and Iceland are members (along with Switzerland and Liechtenstein) of an parallel organization to the EU, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), and (along with Liechtenstein) participate in the European Economic Area or EEA, which gives them access to the EU “single market” for goods and services. That might be a preferable approach for Scotland as well.

And with that I reach the end of my second Brexit post. I apologize for the length, but can promise you that I won’t be writing anything more on Brexit for the foreseeable future (if ever).

Like other registered voters in Howard County, I recently received my postal ballot for the 2020 presidential primary. Some of the decisions I have to make are easy (yes, I’ll vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee for President) while others are hard (gee, there are a lot of Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives, and I have no idea who most of them are). And then there’s the question of who I should vote for in the Howard County Board of Education election.

In recent days there have been posts on the Board of Education race by Jenny Solpietro and Jason Booms, both progressive Democrats, commenting directly or indirectly on the lack of BoE candidates in District 5 that match their own political views. If you’re a progressive Democrat in District 5 then presumably no one you like will end up representing you on the BoE. This is reminiscent of past complaints by conservative Republicans living in (say) County Council District 2 that there was little to no chance of their being represented by someone who shared their own views.

These complaints support my firm opinion that electing Board of Education members (or County Council members) by district makes no sense. Why, do you ask?

First, it causes the problem we see in the current Board of Education race and past County Council races: if your views are at odds with the majority of people in your district, you don’t have a realistic chance of electing someone who reflects your views.

Second, in my opinion electing members by district does not do a very good job of what it was originally justified as doing, namely giving people more of a say in what happens in their “local” schools, i.e., schools in their part of the county. That’s because the district boundaries are arbitrary divisions.

For example, in past times the boundary line between District 1 and District 5 ran down the middle of the street in front of my house. If someone moved across the street to a different Board of Education district, would their concerns as a voter, a taxpayer, and a current or future parent of school-age children change in any significant way?

No, because they’d still be Howard County residents and taxpayers, and they’d still be dealing with a county-wide school system with a single budget, curriculum, and set of policies. The schools that their children attended (or would attend in future) probably also wouldn’t change, since the Board of Education districts are based on County Council districts and don’t necessarily have any relation at all to how HCPSS draws its own district boundaries.

Third, electing BoE members by district ignores the other ways in which voters might differ in their interests, beyond just the part of the county they happen to live in. For example, suppose that you have an interest in seeing more advanced math and science classes, or more funding for arts programs, or increased choices for vocational education, or you have concerns about disorderly classroom environments, or want more attention paid to issues around social justice and equity, or in general have strong opinions concerning any of a host of other issues that might arise in running a large public school system.

Electing members by districts may do little or nothing to ensure that your views are represented on the Board of Education: while there may be a lot of people across the county who share your views, there may be few like-minded individuals within the district you happen to live in.

So, what would be a better approach? The first step would be to abandon election by districts as a well intentioned approach that unfortunately does not address the true problems of representing the views of a diverse county population, and go back to electing all Board of Education members on a county-wide basis. (Under the current scheme only two at-large members are elected county-wide.)

But we can’t stop there. Using the traditional way of electing Board of Education members has its own set of problems. If we simply count the votes for each candidate and elect the five (or seven, or whatever) people with the most number of votes, then we run the risk of having minority views not be represented at all:

If 51% of voters think one way, and 49% of voters another way, the 51% of voters will vote for their preferred candidates and the 49% will vote for their (different) candidates. The result will be that the 51% of voters will get all of their candidates elected, and the other 49% will have no one on the Board of Education representing their views.

(Incidentally, the roles of the majority and the minority can vary. In the past this approach of electing the top set of candidates was used in many US jurisdictions as a way to systematically suppress the votes of African Americans—who would always be a minority in a city- or county-wide election—and elect all-white city or county councils. As a different example, in Howard County in the 1970s electing county council members at large resulted in Democratic dominance of the council, with no Republicans at all elected to the council at one point.)

So what’s the alternative? The alternative is to combine county-wide election of Board of Education members with a voting scheme that better takes into account the full range of voters’ interests, by allowing them to rank candidates in order of preference. I’ve previously written about this “ranked choice” scheme in the context of Howard County Council elections, proposing it to the Charter Review Board and then addressing various follow-up questions about it.

I want to particularly focus on how ranked choice voting can actually do a better job of providing “local” representation on the Board of Education than election by districts:

Suppose you live in (say) Elkridge and think that that area of the county has been neglected by the Board of Education and the Howard County Public School System. Even though in the scheme I’ve proposed the candidates would be running county-wide, nothing would prevent a candidate from running as the “champion of northeast Howard”. This candidate could then be elected as follows:

First, people living in that area could designate that candidate as their first preference. Note that in doing so it wouldn’t matter exactly where these voters live: there would be no artificial district boundary dividing Elkridge from Ellicott City, for example, such if you live just on the Ellicott City side of the boundary line then you don’t get to vote for the “northeast Howard candidate”. This increases the size of the voter pool that the candidate can attract votes from.

Second, it’s possible that other people elsewhere in Howard County might think that northeast Howard needs more attention by the BoE, even if they don’t see it as the most important issue. Those people could vote for the candidate that best represents their own perceived interests, designating them as their first preference, and still vote for the “northeast Howard candidate” as their second preference. If enough people do so, that candidate could be elected even if the number of their supporters in Elkridge or Savage might not be enough to get them elected just on “first preference” votes.

What about the concern that parents wouldn’t know who on the Board of Education to contact if they had concerns about their local schools? That’s easily solved: just have the Board of Education itself assign members to different parts of the county, to serve as the official liasons to parents and students in those areas.

BoE members would naturally nominate themselves to serve those areas that are their natural constituencies, as in the “champion of northeast Howard” example above. And because the Board of Education would be doing this assignment as a matter of board procedure, and not in strict accordance with state law, it could assign members to areas that would be as closely aligned as possible to the actual school catchment areas, and not have to go back to the Maryland legislature in the event that those boundary lines change.

What about the concern that it would be more expensive to campaign county-wide, and that election by districts makes it easier for “local” candidates to run in their own districts without having to raise a lot of money? I think what we are seeing now is at odds with that ideal: since the number of voters in each district is relatively small, and the turnout for a primary is going to be relatively low, it’s possible for wealthy donors inside or (as Julia McCready has complained) outside a district to have an outsized influence in that district’s election.

I’ll close by noting that even though the Board of Education elections have in the eyes of many become more politicized and partisan, adopting a county-wide ranked choice voting scheme for the BoE or County Council should not be a point of partisan contention. In the context of this year’s Board of Education election ranked choice voting would help progressive Democrats who live in western Howard. In the context of the 2022 County Council election ranked choice voting would help conservative Republicans who live in eastern Howard.

That’s because ranked choice voting is designed to better reflect voters’ preferences in general, and to do a better job of ensuring that preferences held only by a minority of voters can nonetheless lead to those voters having representation on elected bodies like the Board of Education or County Council. Who will be in the minority will vary by time, place, and the issues involved, so ranked choice voting offers something for everyone regardless of their particular political views.

Further exploration

For more on this topic see the following:

• “Analysis of Scott E’s D5 BOE Debate”. Jenny Solpietro bemoans the lack of progressive candidates in District 5.
• “Contemplations on the Board of Education Races”. Jason Booms reviews the 2020 Board of Education races and states that he will not be commenting on the District 5 candidates.
• “Here’s the Context”. Julia McCready’s thoughts about the new dynamics of Board of Education races.
• “A better way to elect the Howard County Council” and “Ranked choice voting questions and answers” contain more of my thoughts on ranked choice voting in the context of Howard COunty.
• “Bill proposes to elect Howard school board members by district,” a 2015 Baltimore Sun article by Amanda Yeager and Lisa Philip, discusses the early stages of the effort to elect Board of Education members by districts. The justification was that “constituents . . . are confused about where to turn when they have a question for the board.”
• “Howard school board bill moves forward,” a 2017 Baltimore Sun article by Amanda Yeager, contains quotes from several local politicians for and against the move to elect Board of Education members by district.
• “Howard County Board of Education primary election features new district format, vote-by-mail ballots,” a current Baltimore Sun article by Jacob Calvin Meyer, discusses the new scheme for electing the Board of Education.

tl;dr: I answer questions about ranked choice voting raised by the Howard County Charter Review Commission and others.

I was able to make it to the Howard County Charter Review Commission’s public hearing last night and request that the commission recommend the adoption of ranked choice voting for the Howard County Council, with all members elected county-wide. (See my prior post for a copy of my testimony.)

The members of the commission had various questions about ranked choice voting, as did people on Facebook when I posted a link to my testimony. My answers were off-the-cuff and could be improved in many cases, while one answer (to a question about examples of ranked choice voting in Maryland) was outright incorrect.

Here’s the complete list of questions along with my improved answers.

Wouldn’t this make running for Howard County Council more expensive, since candidates would have to campaign county-wide?

I think running under a ranked choice voting election could be somewhat more expensive, but I think this fear is overblown.

The key point is that running in a ranked choice election for one of five or seven council seats is not like running for county executive. In the county executive race a candidate must aim for more than 50% of the vote, but in a ranked choice election a candidate need only get more than 16.7% (for a five member council) or 12.5% (for a seven person council) of the vote.

That means a candidate could (and should) concentrate expensive and/or time-intensive activities like canvassing or direct mail on their natural base of voters, which might be concentrated in a particular geographical area or based on shared interests. The rest of the voters could be addressed through less expensive means, for example using social media.

If county council members no longer have districts, how would a person know which council member to call for constituent services?

I’m not really the person to ask about this. The people to ask about this are Liz Bobo, Ed Cochran, C. Vernon Gray, Lloyd Knowles, or Ginny Thomas, all of whom were elected to the Howard County Council during a time when council members were elected at large, before council districts were adopted in 1984.

But if you ask me, I’d answer as follows: Even though council members would be elected county-wide, they’d still likely have natural constituencies, based on the area of the county in which they live, particular interest groups they represent, and so on. For example, someone living in Ellicott City concerned about, say, Route 40 development would likely contact whichever council member happened to live in Ellicott City and seemed interested in that issue.

Since there would be no districts, it wouldn’t be possible for redistricting to split up those natural constituencies. If you find a particular council member is responsive to your concerns, you can continue to treat them as “your council member” for as long as they serve. And if that council member ceased to be responsive you’d have the choice of several others to ask instead.

Question: What about retaining council districts and electing members for each district using ranked choice voting?

Answer: This is a perfectly possible scheme to implement, and in fact is implemented in at least one nearby jurisdiction (see below). The technical term for it is “single winner ranked choice voting” or “instant runoff voting”. Voters express their preferences among candidates as before, but only a single winner is chosen.

One problem with single winner ranked choice voting is that it makes sense only if there’s more than two candidates. With two candidates the counting of votes works just like a regular election: whoever has the most first preference votes wins, with the voters’ second preferences not mattering.

So how do we get more than two candidates? There are two possibilities (which are not mutually exclusive). The first is that the two major parties continue to put forward one candidate apiece, but those two candidates are joined by additional candidates who represent smaller parties or who are running as independents.

With ranked choice voting, voters unhappy with the two major parties are free to express their displeasure by giving their first preference votes to someone other than a major party candidate. Their votes would not be wasted, since if their favored candidate doesn’t win their second preferences can help elect someone else, such as the major party candidate they consider the lesser of evils.

Another possibility is that the two major parties put forth multiple candidates of their own, for example, as a substitute for their traditional primaries. Alternatively, they could retain the current primaries but let two or three winners advance to the general election rather than just one. This might help when it’s not clear which of the candidates is more suited for general election success.

However, using single winner ranked choice voting by district does not help with the problem of ensuring that minority groups are represented on the county council. Only if members of such groups were concentrated in one or two districts would they have enough critical mass to help get their favored candidates elected.

What about keeping the five council districts as is, with election by district as done today, and adding two at-large council members elected county-wide?

If the at-large elections were conducted as they usually are, this would almost certainly just result in adding two Democratic council members to the council.

Each party would nominate two candidates for the at-large seats. Given that Democrats have a significant edge in both party registration and votes county-wide (based on the 2018 election), and given that most people (even supposedly unaffiliated voters) would likely vote a straight party ticket, the two Democratic candidates would almost certainly end up with the most votes and be elected.

We know this because this is exactly what happened on a larger scale during the period when Howard County elected all five council members at large. During that era Republicans had more than one member on the county council only once, at a time when Democrats and Republicans were more evenly matched in voting strength than they are today. In 1974 the effect was so pronounced that all five Democratic council candidates were elected and Republicans had no member on the council.

What about using ranked choice voting for the two at-large seats? This would almost certainly always lead to one Democrat and one Republican being elected at-large. In a ranked choice election with two candidates, a candidate can be elected if just around 33.4% of voters select them as their first preference. It’s a simple matter of arithmetic: if two candidates each get 33.4% of first preference votes, or 66.8% between them, the best that any other candidate can do is to get 33.2% of first preference votes and come in third. The first two candidates would then be elected to the two seats.

Given the number of Republican voters in the county and past voting patterns for county council elections (see below), if the Republican party ran a single candidate then that candidate would likely clear the bar of getting 33.4% of first preferences. The same is true of the Democratic party. The two parties would then split the seats between each other.

If ranked choice voting were implemented with a seven-member council and county-wide elections, what would be the likely split between Democratic and Republican council members?

If there were no other parties were involved, my best guess is that we’d see at least two Republicans on the county council (i.e., a 5–2 split), and possibly three (a 4–3 split).

The math again is fairly simple: Using a similar argument as above, with ranked choice voting for a seven-member council a candidate would win if they got just over 12.5% of the first preference votes (100% divided by 8).

In the 2018 election Republican candidates for county council collectively got 43,772 votes out of a total of 136,524 votes in all county council races combined, or about 32%. However, there was no Republican candidate in District 3; if there had been one then the total vote for Republican county council candidates might have been a few points higher, say around 36–38%.

If Republicans ran two candidates in a ranked choice election for seven council seats, and the two GOP candidates each got an equal number of first preference votes, a 32% share of the total vote would translate into 16% of the first preference votes for each candidate, more than the 12.5% needed to get elected.

Could three Republicans win election to a seven-member county council with ranked choice voting? It’s possible, but it would be tight: With three candidates and an equal share of first preference votes, the three candidates collectively would have to get more than 37.5% of the vote (3 times 12.5%), significantly more than the 32% GOP share in the 2018 council election.

However, even if there were not enough first preference votes to elect three Republicans it’s possible that a third Republican might be elected if they could secure a fair number of second preference votes from voters who selected Democratic candidates for their first preferences. The type of candidate best positioned to do this would be a moderate Republican who appealed to many Democrats, for example someone like Allan Kittleman.

Is any jurisdiction in Maryland currently using ranked choice voting?

I answered “no” to this during the hearing, but I was wrong. It turns out that the city of Takoma Park has been using ranked choice voting since 2006 for both its mayoral elections and elections to its city council. All of these are single winner ranked choice (“instant runoff”) elections. Six members of the city council are elected by ward, and the mayor is elected at-large.

Takoma Park’s experience is not fully applicable to Howard County, for at least two reasons. First, Takoma Park does not use a multiple winner ranked choice system like I’ve been discussing above. Second, the total number of votes cast is relatively small. This makes it feasible to count the votes by hand, something that would be relatively time-consuming in Howard County.

However the use of ranked choice voting in Takoma Park does indicate that the concept is not foreign to Maryland, and it seems to be both well-understood and popular among voters in the city.

Would the Maryland legislature have to pass special legislation in order for Howard County to use ranked choice voting?

I’m not a lawyer and can’t give a definitive opinion on this. However to my knowledge the only restriction imposed by the Constitution of Maryland on Howard County is as follows:

The charter for the government of any county governed by the provisions of this Article may provide for the election of members of the county council by the voters of councilmanic districts therein established, or by the voters of the entire county, or by a combination of these methods of election. (Article XI-A, Section 3A.)

A ranked choice election conducted on a county-wide basis would appear to satisfy this requirement.

That’s all the questions I can remember. If you have further questions please feel free to ping me on Facebook or Twitter (@hecker).

For further exploration

For more information on ranked choice voting in Takoma Park, see the following:

• “Instant runoff voting in action in Takoma Park”. A description of how single winner ranked choice voting worked in a 2012 special election in Takoma Park Ward 5.
• “Frequently Asked questions about instant runoff voting”. How the Takoma Park city government explains single winner ranked choice voting to city residents.
• “Takoma Park Municipal Code, Section 606, Election of Mayor and Councilmembers”. The section of the Takoma Park municipal code outlining the “instant runoff” procedure for voting for the mayor and members of the city council.
• “City of Takoma Park, Maryland, Ward 5 Special Election, January 30, 2007 Ballot”. Sample ballot explaining to Takoma Park voters how to use the single winner ranked choice system.

Numbers for Republican vote share in the 2018 county council elections are from the official 2018 gubernatorial election results for Howard County. See also my 2012 post “How to win an STV election for Howard County Council, part 1” for an example of how a ranked choice election might have played out based on the 2010 election results.

Finally, Section 3A of Article XI-A of the Constitution of Maryland appears to be the governing language on how Maryland charter counties (like Howard) can conduct council elections.

tl;dr: Tweaking the council redistricting process is the wrong solution. Ranked choice voting is the right one.

I’ve been preoccupied with other things and missed the fact that the Howard County Charter Review Commission is having its last public hearing tonight. James Howard, one of the commission members, recently published a preview of the commission’s recommendations.

The primary recommendation is to increase the size of the Howard County Council from five members to seven, presumably to reflect the increased population since the first Howard County Charter was adopted in 1968. I support this recommendation.

A second set of recommendations is tweak the process of redrawing council district lines, apparently in an effort to make the process less partisan. While these recommendations are worthy in and of themselves, I think they miss the point in terms of reforming the way the Howard County Council is elected. I think a better approach would be to ditch the entire council district system.

Here’s a statement I wrote to give in public testimony before the Charter Review Commission. Since it’s too late to submit written testimony by email, and I may not be able to get to the last public hearing tonight, I’m publishing it here in case anyone else wants to use it. (I’ve timed the statement to make sure it comes in under three minutes, the limit for individuals proving testimony.)

As I understand it, the Charter Review Commission is likely to recommend increasing the Howard County Council from five members to seven. However, I would like to go on record as asking the commission to consider recommending an alternative approach: to get rid of council districts, and instead elect council members on a county-wide basis using ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank the various candidates in order of their preference.

I also understand that the commission is likely to make other recommendations to improve the process of council redistricting. But beyond the time-consuming and contentious task of drawing new district lines, electing council members by districts has an inherent flaw that cannot be remedied: Suppose you are a voter who is a member of a minority group spread relatively evenly across the county, whether that be a minority ethnic or racial group, a minority political party, or a minority interest group of any type. Your chances of having a council member representing your group are low, because your group is not likely to be a majority in any individual council district.

But in a ranked choice county-wide election your vote will count again: With a seven-member council, if your group makes up at least 10-15% of the voting population you have a good chance of electing at least one council member sympathetic to your interests. If your group makes up at least 20% of voters, that chance becomes almost a certainty.

As documented by FairVote (fairvote.org), the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center (rankedchoicevoting.org), and others, ranked-choice voting schemes do a much better job of electing candidates who reflect voters’ true preferences. They help to preserve the voting power of minority populations, by ensuring that their votes are not wasted: even if their most preferred candidate loses, their second, third, and other preferences can help elect other suitable candidates.

When implemented using properly designed ballots, ranked choice voting is both simple for voters to understand and compatible with optical scan systems like those used in Howard County. The actual tabulation of results can be carried out either by computer or, if desired, by hand, for example in a recount of paper ballots.

Ranked choice voting has been successfully implemented in a number of US jurisdictions, including at the state, city, and county level. In particular, I recommend for the commission’s consideration the charter language and detailed voting rules implemented by the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for elections to its nine-member City Council and six-member School Committee.

Like Cambridge, Howard County prides itself on its high-tech economy and educated population. It deserves no less than a modern voting system that helps ensure that the Howard County Council reflects as much as possible the rich diversity of Howard County and the true preferences of Howard County voters. Thank you.

For further exploration

For more information on and arguments for ranked choice voting, see the following:

• Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. “The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center provides a compilation of best practices and first-hand experiences from jurisdictions that have used this method of voting.” The people behind it have deep experience as election administrators.
• FairVote. More activist in nature, “FairVote is a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters greater choice, a stronger voice, and a representative democracy that works for all Americans.”
• Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. Argues that the current two-party duopoly is driving political polarization and gridlock, and that the only way to fix it is by moving to ranked choice voting.

For more information on other local jurisdictions considering ranked choice voting, see the following news stories:

• “Group pursues ‘ranked-choice’ voting for San Diego city elections”. An initiative in San Diego, California.
• “Portland voters will decide whether to expand ranked-choice voting”. An initiative in Portland, Maine.
• “Vancouver eyes ranked-choice voting system”. An initiative in Vancouver, Washington.

For more information on how Howard County came to have council districts in the first place, see my book, Dividing Howard. For more details on how ranked choice voting might work in Howard County, see my series, “Electing a council that reflects Howard County”. (Those posts, written eight years ago, use the older term “proportional representation” used in other countries. The term “ranked choice voting” is what is used now in the US.)

UPDATE 2024/01/04: This post originally appeared on my Civility and Truth Substack newsletter. I’ve moved it to my main site in an effort to collect all of my writing in one place.

Some thoughts on the Iowa caucuses vs. the Irish general election.

There’s a saying in the world of information technology: fast, cheap, or good, pick any two. It captures the inherent trade-off between the desire for a solution that provides high performance and/or rapid response times, that’s doesn’t cost a lot of money, and that actually does what it’s supposed to do without errors or failures.

This saying applies in other areas as well, including elections. We saw this most recently in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, which devolved into a spectacular mess of non-working apps, jammed phone lines, voter confusion, and misinformation (and sometimes disinformation) propagated by media pundits, politicians, and activists all vying to declare definitive results as soon as possible.

The Iowa caucuses involved a mere 176,000 people, comparable to the number of people who turn out in a local Howard County election. Across the Atlantic ocean this weekend there’s an election involving an order of magnitude more voters. If past experience is any indication, while the election results may be surprising (see my next post) the actual process of getting to those results will be reassuringly boring.

I’m referring to the general election in Ireland—or the Republic of Ireland, to distinguish it from Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK. The election is to select representatives to the Dáil (pronounced “doyle”), the lower house of the Irish parliament (comparable to the House of Commons in the UK).

To take the “good” aspect first: the Irish voting system does a good job of producing results that reflect what voters actually want, and is pretty simple for voters to use: voters fill out a single ballot sheet listing all the candidates for the (multiple) Dáil seats in their particular constituency. They then put numbers beside the names of each of their favored candidates, ranking them in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, and so on. Then they turn in their ballot. That’s it.

(Incidentally, the Iowa caucus rules are also designed to also reflect voter preferences among multiple candidates, but they don’t do as good a job, and are much more complicated for voters to understand and follow.)

As implied above, Irish elections do not use any sort of electronic voting equipment. This reduces capital expenses for elections and removes the possibility of voting machines or other computer-based systems being hacked. This checks both the “cheap” and “good” boxes.

So, what about the “fast” box? Recall the catch: “pick any two.” Voting in the 2020 Irish general election was yesterday, Saturday, February 8. However, the final results of that election are not likely to be known until Monday or Tuesday at the earliest.

Why so long? Because by making the voting system more likely to reflect voters’ preferences, simple for voters to use, not needing electronic equipment, and not vulnerable to hacking, the vote count itself becomes a very people- and time-intensive process. Greatly simplified, it goes something like this (see this “dummy’s guide to election count” for a more detailed explanation):

After collecting paper ballots and storing them securely overnight, the next morning election workers open the ballot boxes in the presence of political party representatives (as shown above). The vote counters sort the ballot papers by voters’ first preferences: one pile for ballots noting candidate A as “number 1,” a second pile for ballots noting candidate B as “number 1,” and so on. They then count the number of first preference votes for each candidate and the total number of votes.

Based on the number of seats, the total number of votes, and the vote shares for each candidate, it’s possible that one or more candidates receive more than enough first-preference votes to be elected without further ado (i.e., “they exceed the quota on the first count”). If so, their excess votes (more than were needed to elect them) are distributed to other candidates who were indicated as the second preferences of voters voting for the just-elected candidate(s). A second count then occurs in which one of the remaining candidates now has enough votes or (failing that) the candidate receiving the fewest votes is eliminated.

This process of electing or eliminating candidates, followed by transferring votes to the remaining candidates based on voter preferences, continues until candidates are elected to fill all open seats. This typically requires several counts, each of which (again) requires manually inspecting the ballot papers. If the counting isn’t finished by the end of the day then everyone goes home and resumes the process the next day.

Americans, or at least American media, are notoriously impatient and desirous of instant gratification. Americans are also addicted to technology almost for technology’s sake, so that each new shiny thing that comes along (touch screens! the Internet! blockchain!) is hailed as the solution for voting that will truly and finally deliver on “fast,” “cheap,” and “good” all at once.

There are also many people with a vested interest in the current winner-take-all US electoral system, starting with the politicians and activists of the two major political parties. Thus it’s difficult to see the US ever adopting the Irish voting system or anything similar to it, at least at the national level. And indeed if this ever does happen I suspect it will not be until a generation or two has passed, and resistance to the idea is overwhelmed by ongoing political conflicts that motivate peoples’ desire for fundamental changes to the American political and electoral system.

But whether it comes soon or not for a generation or two, I think the US would be well served to look to change its way of electing candidates to better match the way it’s done in Ireland. It’s possible that with appropriate electronic assistance it can be done in a way that’s quicker than typical Irish experience (though of course not without bringing some risk into the system).

Some US cities and states are now experimenting with a form of the Irish system, under the names “ranked-choice voting” or (when a single position is being filled) “instant-runoff voting.” For some thoughts on why this nascent movement is on net a good thing for the US, see my next post.

UPDATE 2024/01/04: This post originally appeared on my Civility and Truth Substack newsletter. I’ve moved it to my main site in an effort to collect all of my writing in one place.

This week I’m again taking off from doing data analysis, but my topic is not actually that removed from my previous posts on population density in Howard County: I take a look at the long history of political conflict between urbanized areas and rural areas, with a focus on how that played out in the United Kingdom in the 19th century.

From their beginnings in Mesopotamia six thousand years ago cities have attracted those in search of opportunity and attractions. But cities have also been seen as alien intrusions upon a landscape of farms, forests, and grasslands perceived to be the true heart of a nation.

In a predominantly agricultural economy those who possessed land thereby possessed political power. As cities grew larger and wealthier their inhabitants, and especially their elites—merchants and traders—sought a share of such power, but faced an uphill battle in a political system that was rigged in favor of a land-owning aristocracy.

One such battle occurred in the UK in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as it was making the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. At that time members of Parliament were elected by a voting population that was not only small but unevenly distributed between rural and urban “boroughs” (electoral districts).

The most infamous example of this was the borough of Old Sarum (shown above), site of a hilltop fortress and associated settlement that had been abandoned in the 14th century but was still allotted two members of Parliament through the 18th and early 19th century. In 1831 those two members were elected by a total of only eleven voters, all absentee landowners.

Old Sarum was the most extreme of what were termed “pocket boroughs” or “rotten boroughs”, but it was far from the only one. According to Wikipedia, “By the time of the 1831 general election, out of 406 elected members, 152 were chosen by fewer than 100 voters each, and 88 by fewer than fifty voters.” The overall electorate at that time was about 400,000 people (where “people” here really means “men with substantial holdings of property”), and the population of the UK around 25 million or so.

Thus in the early 19th century a majority of the Parliament (240 members out of 406) were elected by less than 20,000 voters, less than 5% of the electorate and less than 0.1% of the total UK population.

The painting above shows a different kind of landscape, dominated by the factory chimneys of the city of Manchester. At the center of Britain’s industrial revolution, Manchester grew from a small market town of 10,000 people in the early 18th century to a city thirty times that large by the mid-19th century. It ended the 19th century encompassing a metropolitan area of over 2 million people.

This rapid growth left Manchester both disenfranchised as a city (it shared one member of Parliament with the surrounding county) and populated by a new working class that grew restive at its treatment and hungered for representation. However this movement was strongly resisted by the political powers that be: the French revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars had rendered the landowning British aristocracy paranoid about the possibility of revolution closer to home.

The local militias raised against an invasion of England that never came were thus repurposed into a force to guard against the possibility of internal rebellion. The villain George Wickham in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was a member of such a militia, and at the end of the novel was deployed to the industrial town of Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England.

Opposition to reform was of course not couched as a way to retain power and privilege, but rather as advocacy of government by an enlightened and educated property-owning aristocracy, instead of “mob rule.” Jane Austen implicitly made this argument in novels like Pride and Prejudice, which features a young landed aristocrat (Mr. Darcy) growing into his responsibilities as a member of the ruling class, and Mansfield Park, which contrasts the sedate and staid morality of the eponymous country estate with the laxity of London—where “everything is to be got with money,” in the words of antagonist Mary Crawford.

However Austen was no fool. Through the words of her heroine Fanny Price she implied that the tranquility of Mansfield Park was established on the backs of slaves, and she also knew that many local gentry fell far short of the ideal of Mr. Darcy—see for example her portrait of the idle and vain baronet Sir Walter Eliot in Persuasion. She was a member of a nascent middle class, many of whom would make common cause with their working class brethren in support of political reform.

In August of 1819, almost exactly two hundred years ago (and two years after the death of Jane Austen), the growing movement for Parliamentary reform met violent resistance, in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre: A crowd of tens of thousands of people in Manchester (a substantial fraction of the local population) was gathered to hear a speech by the radical reformer Henry Hunt, when they were set upon by a local militia ordered by city magistrates to disperse the crowd. Eighteen people were killed in the ensuing chaos (depicted in the cartoon above), and several hundred wounded.

(Incidentally, the British director Mike Leigh—himself from Manchester—did a film about this event, titled simply Peterloo; it’s available on Amazon Prime Video. It’s less of a conventional film and more of a dramatized documentary, and its portrait of the aristocracy and the local magistrates shades over into caricature more than once, but it does give a good feel for the rhetoric and passions of the time.)

This act of violent suppression of a peaceful political gathering raised a wide public outcry, but in practical terms its result was a doubling-down of efforts to suppress movements for electoral and other reforms.

The movement for Parliamentary reform won its first victory in the form of the 1832 Reform Act, which eliminated the worst of the rotten boroughs, created new boroughs for cities like Manchester, and expanded the franchise significantly—although it was still restricted to male property owners. (The painting above shows the first Parliament elected after passage of the Act.)

Even this partial victory did not come easily: the bill went down to defeat twice, the second time due to opposition in the House of Lords, and only passed the third time after widespread urban riots and threats by the king to appoint new reform-minded peers.

The movement for Parliamentary reform continued, embodied in the movement known as Chartism. The actual demands of the Chartists seem rather mild and conventional by present-day lights: they included universal male suffrage, secret ballots, constituencies of equal size, and salaries for Members of Parliament. These were presented in the form of various petitions to Parliament over the years, each signed by over a million people. (The engraving above shows a procession conveying the petition of 1842.)

Nonetheless the Chartists, like the Parliamentary reformers before them, were portrayed as radical revolutionaries bent on overturning the established order. The petitions were ignored, and eventually the movement withered away at mid-century.

However in the longer term the reformers’ demands were met: the secret ballot was introduced in 1872, constituencies were reorganized in 1885, and the franchise was steadily expanded, culminating in the extensions of the franchise to women in 1918 (for women 30 and older) and 1928 (for all adult women).

So, enough history. What’s the point? The point is that we still live with this legacy of city vs. country, in both our political institutions and our political rhetoric. The rhetoric harks back to the conflicts between Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned America as a land of independent small farmers, and Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, who sought to make America’s cities powerhouses of commerce and industry. It echoes down to the present-day, when areas like the deep South or the Great Plains are lauded as “the real America” while multicultural metropolises like New York City and Los Angeles are not, even though the latters’ metropolitan areas are home to 1 in 14 and 1 in 25 Americans respectively.

More importantly though, our political institutions favor country over city, most notably in the US Senate, an upper legislative chamber in which predominantly rural states with small populations have equal representation with heavily-urbanized states with populations an order of magnitude larger. The more rural states can thus exercise disproportionate political power in everything from blocking legislation to confirming Supreme Court justices.

The US Census bureau cartogram above helps illustrate this; it retains the shape of states but shows their sizes relative to their population. For example, California by itself appears to equal at least six of its neighboring western states in population, with Alaska thrown in as well, but has only two Senators compared to their twelve or fourteen.

A common response to this observation is “we’re a republic, not a democracy.” This harks back to the Founders’ fear of direct (as opposed to representative) democracy, but in the present-day context is just a fancier way of saying “them’s the rules, go pound sand.” Thus I don’t think this is an answer that should be taken seriously.

So what are the “take aways” here? If the history of Parliamentary reform in the UK is any guide, in the political war between city and country the continued growth of cities ensure that they will win in the end. In the UK it proved unsustainable for a relatively small minority to exercise power over a large majority, and so it will prove in the US. The only questions are: how long will it take? how exactly will it happen? and how severe will be the conflicts that drive the change?

The answer to the first question I think may be, surprisingly long. Depending on exactly when you consider it started and ended, the drive for Parliamentary reform took anywhere from fifty to a hundred and fifty years. (And even today the British political system, like that in the US, uses a system of “first past the post” elections in single-member districts that blunts the political power of popular movements: a party that can command 49.9% of the vote in all districts—but no more—finds itself with no representatives at all.)

In the US it took about eighty years from the creation of the US Constitution to the Reconstruction Amendments that formally gave former (male) slaves the vote, and almost as long again to extend the franchise to women and provide for direct election of US Senators. Given this history, it could easily take half or more of the 21st century to change the institutional imbalances inherent in the present system.

As for how it might happen, the US has a problem in that its political framework is considerably more rigid than that of the UK. The key is the US Senate: it (along with the House of Representatives) must approve proposed amendments to the Constitution, must (again with the House) approve applications for statehood and thus the new Senate seats those would bring, and has the sole power to confirm Supreme Court justices who might be relied upon to uphold the existing order as much as possible. The Senate is likely therefore the last redoubt of an otherwise minority party: if it falls, and falls for good, defeat is almost certain.

Amendments to the Constitution require a two-thirds majority in the Senate as well as the House (or approval of two-thirds of state legislatures to hold a constitutional convention), along with ratification by three-fourths of the states (or their respective ratifying conventions). I therefore doubt any fundamental constitutional change will occur in the foreseeable future relating to the Senate (or the electoral college, for that matter). More plausible is the admission of new states to the union, either jurisdictions like the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico already proposed for statehood, or new states formed by splitting up large and populous states like California.

Assuming the state legislatures were in favor (which is not necessarily a good assumption in splitting states, since many might object to losing territory), this would require only simple majorities in the Senate and House along with a President willing to sign the bill. (I am assuming that by this time the Senate filibuster would have been abolished in an effort to retain Senate control with only a slim majority.) Of course, this works both ways: assuming the opposing party were to subsequently gain control of Senate, House, and Presidency, it could work with cooperative small states to split them into even smaller states and thus regain ground in the Senate.

Finally, how will change happen, especially if control of the Senate remains contested? Those with a bloodthirsty bent may be hankering after a second US civil war, but based on past history in other countries it’s more likely that widespread nonviolent civil disobedience will be the key to future US institutional change. The “magic number” is hypothesized to be about 3.5% of the population or more. In US terms this would correspond to at least 12 million people actively participating in protests and generally mucking up the workings of society, business, and government in a nonviolent way in pursuit of a coherent set of political goals.

The bottom line: I think change will come, but I anticipate that the (US) war between city and country will not end in my lifetime.

That’s all for this week, I hope to write to you again in two weeks. A reminder: if you find these posts interesting and useful please tell other people about them and encourage them to subscribe to the Civility and Truth mailing list. Having readers who care enough to subscribe helps motivate me to send these posts out on a regular basis, and the more readers I have the more motivated I’ll be. In the meantime, thanks for reading this post!

NOTE: This article was originally published in my Civility and Truth Substack newsletter. I have republished it here without changes.

Currently the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (to give it its full name) is in the middle of a shambolic process that may or may not see it leave the European Union, the 28-member community of states united by a set of treaties and laws establishing a single market, a customs union, a common travel area, a common currency (the Euro), and a set of European-wide government bodies and related institutions.

If you’re not that familiar with the EU check out its own “easy-to-read” description, which is simultaneously informative and reads like propaganda intended to indoctrinate schoolchildren. If you’re interested in a mainstream explainer on what’s going on with “Brexit” (as it’s universally known), you can check out this New York Times explainer from one of America’s preeminent establishment media. But if you’re like me and you have a hankering for more in-depth and idiosyncratic commentary on Brexit and its political, economic, and social dimensions, here are some sources I’ve been reading regularly as events unfold.

I myself think the UK is making a mistake in leaving the EU, or at least in doing so the way it is, so in UK terms I’d be considered a “remainer”. However I’ve included several sources below who are in the “leave” camp, in order to provide balance, because I think it’s interesting in general to see arguments from people whose perspective is different from ones’ own, and (most important) because I find the political, philosophical, and personal differences among the “leavers” to be quite fascinating.

The negotiator: Ivan Rogers

When in March 2017 UK Prime Minister Theresa May invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, formally notifying the European Union of the UK’s intention to leave the EU, one of the key people entrusted with the task of negotiating the UK’s withdrawal was Sir Mark Ivan Rogers KCMG (to give him his full name and title), a long-serving senior civil servant who was at that time British Permanent Representative to the EU.

Unfortunately Prime Minister May, under pressure from her Conservative Party colleagues, set out preconditions for the UK’s withdrawal that greatly complicated the task of negotiating such a withdrawal agreement, most notably declaring that the UK would leave the EU single market and end the freedom of movement required under EU laws. Frustrated with the task of squaring May’s priorities with the realities of EU-UK integration, Ivan Rogers first expressed his frustration in a private memo (inevitably leaked) and subsequently resigned his position in January 2017.

Since then Rogers has given a series of public speeches that essentially amount to an extended “I told you so” tour regarding the UK’s Brexit difficulties. These are to some degree repetitive, but are worth reading or watching just for the oh-so-British subdued disdain directed at those among the British political establishment who did not really understand how the European Union works and underestimated the complexities of leaving it. A lecture by Rogers last January 29 at the University College of London European Institute is a good recent example of the genre, available as a text document for the impatient and as a video for those who want the full Ivan Rogers experience.

The Irish (Northern and otherwise): Slugger O’Toole

One of the major stumbling blocks in the UK’s Brexit negotiations with the EU has been the future status of the land border between Ireland, i.e., the independent state often referred to as the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland, the region of the UK that occupies the northeastern part of the island of Ireland. This would be a controversial topic even in the absence of other factors, since if the UK leaves the EU this border will be the only land border between the UK and an EU country.

However matters are further complicated because since 1998 Northern Ireland has had a sui generis constitutional status within the UK as a result of the Good Friday Agreement (also known as the Belfast Agreement) that was intended to function as a settlement between those (mainly Catholic) residents of Northern Ireland favoring (re)unification with the Republic of Ireland, and those (mainly Protestant) residents wishing Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK.

Both Ireland and the UK have been EU members since 1973, and after the Good Friday Agreement the EU single market and related aspects of the EU, along with various bilateral arrangements between the UK and Ireland, to some extent erased or at least made less visible the differences between Ireland north and south. However with Brexit, at least as Theresa May has conceived it, the UK will be out of the EU single market and no longer subject to EU mandates regarding freedom of movement and other matter of interest to Northern Irish residents and businesses.

Concern for the impact of these changes on the post-GFA settlement led to the idea of the “backstop,” i.e., some way of keeping Ireland and the UK (or possibly just Northern Ireland) in regulatory alignment should post-Brexit negotiations on future EU-UK relations hit a sticking point. However, the backstop is anathema to the Democratic Unionist Party, the Northern Irish political party with Protestant fundamentalist roots whose votes in Parliament Theresa May is dependent on to pass Brexit-related measures. That conflict plays a major factor, if not the major factor, in May’s inability to conclude a withdrawal agreement with the EU.

If you’d like a ringside seat to this battle and a guide to the Northern Irish politics driving it, my recommendation is to check out the Slugger O’Toole political blog, which I’ve been reading since the mid-1990s. Correspondent Brian Walker (formerly of the BBC) weighs in regularly on all matters Brexit, with a slight lean to the “nationalist” perspective (i.e., favoring Irish unification), while Slugger founder Mick Fealty weighs in from time to time from a “unionist”-leaning perspective.

But really the best reason to read the site is because of the regular commenters, who exhibit the stereotypical Irish “gift of gab” as they endlessly dispute with one another over matters sacred and profane. Ireland is a small place, not much larger than Maryland in population, and Northern Ireland is smaller still. Thus their online arguments have the practiced familiarity characteristic of people who’ve been stuck together in the same place all their lives and despite their differences can’t quite bring themselves to quit the field. Brexit has given them something new to argue about, and they’re making the most of it.

The reformer (?): Richard North

Now we come to the “leavers” and “Eurosceptics”. Of those one of the most prolific is Richard North, known as “Dr. North” to some of his followers, both because he has a PhD. and also to distinguish him from his son Peter, discussed below. North, a food safety consultant and former candidate for the anti-EU Referendum Party, served as at least an informal advisor to the leaders of one of the campaigns supporting the “leave” position in the June 2016 referendum, but has since had a falling out with his former colleagues over the handling of the Brexit negotiations.

A reviewer once dismissed one of the poet Muriel Rukyeser’s works in a single line: “There’s one thing you can say about Muriel: she’s not lazy.” The same could be said of Richard North, who posts almost every day without fail on his site eureferendum.com. North is in some ways the anti-EU version of Ivan Rogers (whose speeches he sometimes quotes), except that he doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for those politicians whom he feels have made a hash out of Brexit.

Although he is a long-time Eurosceptic, North’s position is almost (but not quite!) that of a reformer: He believes that the geographic position of the UK means that it will always have a close relationships with the countries of continental Europe, and that the depth and complexity of the legal arrangements between the EU and the UK mean that withdrawing from the EU must needs be a long and drawn-out affair.

To that end North proposed a “Flexcit” plan under which the UK would upon leaving the EU be a member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and the European Economic Area (EEA), international frameworks through which non-EU countries like Norway have access to the EU single market, albeit on the condition that they maintain extensive harmonization with EU laws and regulations.

The Flexcit plan did not prove popular with other “leave” proponents, who wanted a more rapid and complete separation of the UK from the EU, though proposals bearing a passing resemblance to it occasionally surface in Brexit debates as variants of the so-called “Norway option.” Meanwhile North fulminates from the sidelines, offering a daily combination of entertaining vitriol and sometimes genuinely useful analyses of the impact of Brexit.

The populist: Peter North

Peter North is Richard North’s son. He doesn’t have the depth of knowledge of his father, but his Pete North Politics Blog provides a clearer picture of the populist spirit motivating many of the “leave” campaigners and voters.

Peter North’s main argument is that the people of the UK need to “take back control” not only from a European Union that is allegedly anti-democratic and overreaching, but also from a Parliament whose members are perceived to be ignorant and out of touch, part of the “Westminster bubble”. It’s a similar argument to that of US populists who responded to the call to “drain the swamp,” and indeed North seems to share many of the attitudes of Trump-era US conservatives (including periodically-expressed hostility to transgender people).

Peter North, like his father Richard, has somewhat of a point here: based on Brexit doings thus far many contemporary British politicians of all stripes, both “remainers” and “leavers,” do seem to be uninformed at best and incompetent at worst. North attributes this to their being infantilized by the EU, their job reduced simply to that of rubber-stamping EU dictates into UK law.

But I think it’s also possible that (independent of the EU) past British politicians simply had more weighty affairs of state to occupy their attention, most notably waging wars, and that tended to weed out the less able. For example, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Clement Atlee, the post-WW2 Prime Minister who with his colleagues built the modern British welfare state, had first proved his mettle organizing the domestic war effort as Winston Churchill’s unsung deputy.

In any case Peter North apparently sees Brexit as a cleansing fire that will expose and destroy the dead wood of British politics, to be succeeded by the new green shoots of local government initiatives driven by a resurgent British people.

This is of course assuming that Brexit actually happens—and there’s at least some chance it may not. In the event it does not Peter North paints a very different picture of a people betrayed by the establishment, and throws out dark hints of the violent fate that might befall those instrumental in that betrayal. In this way too North echoes US political themes in a UK context.

The revolutionary: Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings, one of the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign, is sometimes portrayed as the mastermind or evil genius of Brexit, a status cemented by the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as Cummings in the TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War. Like a proper evil genius Cummings pontificates at length on his blog, justifying his actions and laying out his plans for world domination.

Cummings is famous for leading a sophisticated voter targeting campaigning for Vote Leave, including the extensive use of social media. In this he is sometimes confused with the folks behind the controversial consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which was actually working for the rival Leave.EU organization. (Cummings himself dismisses his would-be evil genius rivals as “charlatans” whose sales pitch he rejected.)

Unlike Richard North, Dominic Cummings downplayed the need to present a detailed plan for Brexit. This no doubt held the diverse “leave” coalition together long enough for a successful referendum, at the expense of contributing to the current British political deadlock over exactly what sort of Brexit is called for. (For this reason Cummings apparently has earned North’s undying enmity.)

Like Peter North, Cummings sees Brexit as an opportunity for the UK to make a fresh start. However unlike Peter North Cummings is less interested in populist uprisings and more interested in the possibility of Brexit freeing the UK to become a leader in new technologies like AI and genomics. He points to the Manhattan and Apollo projects, the work of ARPA in creating the Internet, and other successful large-scale government initiatives, and calls for the UK government to adopt innovative management strategies modeled on those employed in those projects.

As it happens I have an interest in these topics as well, I read books and blogs by many of the same people Cummings does, and I often find myself nodding along while reading his posts. However at the same time I’m reminded of the old complaint “if we can go to the moon why can’t we do X?,” where X is some complex social problem that is not necessarily amenable to simple technological fixes.

I also don’t see Cummings laying out any plausible political strategy for how some future UK government might be persuaded to implement his bold ideas, Brexit or no. This is especially true given that Cummings, like North père et fils, is openly contemptuous regarding the intelligence and competence of the typical British politician and civil servant. (Former Prime Minister David Cameron returned the favor, referring to Cummings as a “career psychopath.”)

So for the most part Cummings seems to be pushing the “underpants gnomes” strategy for Brexit: “Step 1. Leave the EU. Step 2. ? Step 3. Profit!” Perhaps he’ll be lucky enough to see someone become Prime Minister who’s sympathetic to his ideas and will give him free rein to implement them—for example Michael Gove, whom Cummings previously served as a special advisor while Gove was Education Secretary.

Or perhaps Cummings will find himself in a similar position as Trump-sympathetic intellectuals in the US: cheering on a new political face and imagining them as an “agent of chaos” whose reign will destroy the old world and make possible a new one in which the intellectuals’ dreams can become reality. As has happened in the US, I suspect Cummings will find that whatever new political leader emerges will have their own personal agenda, and no interest in his.

That certainly seems to be the case with Brexit thus far: both the “leave” and “remain” causes have apparently attracted a considerable number of chancers and opportunists, looking to Brexit as a way to pull themselves up the ladder of political success. (In this context Theresa May, whatever her flaws and missteps, often seems to be the only adult in the room.) The Brexit countdown continues, and I’ll be checking in every day for the color commentary.

How exactly do schools and parents matter? To what degree are the actions of parents responsible for how their children turn out, and how? What do children really learn in school, and what might they learn? And how do these questions relate to issues that Howard County is facing today, including housing affordability, school redistricting, raising students’ test scores, and the like?

Judith Rich Harris was once a Harvard graduate student in psychology before being kicked out of the program on the grounds that she would not “develop into our professional stereotype of what an experimental psychologist should be.” Prevented by chronic illness from obtaining her doctorate elsewhere, she first found employment as a writer of psychology textbooks and then began a second career as a independent researcher after coming to disbelieve conventional wisdom about the role of parents in child development. Her death last December at the age of 80 prompted me to explore her work and write this post.

Nothing that Harris wrote, or that I write here, should be taken as gospel. The state of psychology as a science right now is very unsettled, and (as I discuss below) it will likely take some while for the discipline to come to a consensus on how well Harris’s ideas explain the world. But her ideas are certainly plausible and consistent with other things we know about family, school, and society, so if nothing else you can consider this an interesting thought experiment about how the world might be different than we think, and our education and related policies likewise different.

How do parents affect their children’s development?

Harris’s chief interest as a researcher was in how children develop their personalities and become socialized to live and work in the world. Why is this such an important topic?

In my “seven answers” article on liberty and equality I discussed how even in the world of Major League Baseball, in which everyone might be expected to perform at an equally high level, there are large differences in players’ performances. Some of these can be chalked up to differences in raw athletic ability, but others are plausibly due to differences in personality and resulting behavior: how willing are players to practice? Do they listen to their coaches’ instructions and follow them? Are they leaders in the clubhouse, or disruptive to team cohesion?

As in baseball, so in life: conscientiousness, likeability, willingness to cooperate, and other factors help determine how successful people will be in their careers. Other aspects of personality, like altruism, community spirit, kindness, and so on, affect our judgements of how morally good a person is.

The traditional view (which is actually relatively recent in historical terms) is that parents’ guidance is the most important factor in molding children’s personalities: that if children are studious or kind it is supposedly because their parents “raised them right,” and if they fall short in any area then it is allegedly due to their parents failing to do their job.

In the course of writing psychology textbooks and reviewing the research on which they were based, Harris concluded that the traditional view was wrong: that parents’ actions in and of themselves have relatively little influence in how their children turn out, and that to the extent children resemble their parents in personality it is in large part because parents pass those personality traits on to them, in the same way parents pass on their facial features and hair color.

Harris spends much of her book The Nurture Assumption building the case for this. One key argument has to do with children who are adopted: that such children’s personalities do not typically resemble those of other children born into the same families, while identical twins have similar personalities even if they are adopted into other families and raised apart. In baseball terms, it’s unlikely that the average Little Leaguer would have become an MLB prospect if adopted by Ken Griffey, Sr. However, it’s likely that Ken Griffey, Jr., would have found athletic success even away from his father’s influence, if he had been given the opportunity to develop his talent (a key point to which I’ll return).

This is not to say that parents do not and cannot positively influence their children in any way—an extreme position that many of Harris’s critics ascribed to her, and a reaction that she herself sometimes inadvertently provoked by taking an “everything you know is wrong” attitude.

First, parents can and should provide their children the things we’d expect all children to have in a civilized society: adequate food and shelter, medical care, physical security and freedom from abuse of all kinds, and so on.

It is in turn the mark of a civilized society that it makes it possible for all parents to do this: that parents can earn wages sufficient to provide for their families (or be financially assisted if they cannot), that they can provide health care to their children without bankrupting themselves, that their homes and water supplies are free of lead and other poisons harmful to children’s development, and that they are subject to a system of policing that both protects and respects their persons.

Parents also influence their children by their actions in acknowledging and reinforcing the personalities already inherent in the children: if a child appears to be studious and interested in reading their parents buy them books and take them to libraries, if they show artistic inclinations their parents take them to the theater and museums, and if they like physical activity their parents play with them more and sign them up for youth sports.

This behavior is very much influenced by the parents’s own inherent personalities passed down to their offspring: for example, parents who are athletic will tend to have children who are also athletic, and then (being athletic themselves) will tend to further encourage those children in athletic activities. But again the larger society also plays a role, by providing opportunities for parents to influence their children in these ways, for example by funding public playgrounds and athletic fields.

Finally, through their actions parents can influence the behavior of children within the family itself, including children’s attitudes toward their parents: parents who treat their children with kindness and respect will be more likely than harsh and cruel parents to have their children respect them and treat them kindly in turn. This influence may not carry over into children’s behavior in the outside world—indeed Harris argues that children’s behavior in the outside world often bears little or no similarity to their behavior in the home—but it can improve the quality of the parent-child relationship.

How does the outside world influence children’s development?

If parents do not greatly influence their children’s personalities (beyond whatever personality traits were passed down from parent to child at birth), what does?

Harris contended that the major influence on children’s personality development and socialization is the world outside their families, and in particular the peers they encounter at school and elsewhere. One of Harris’s key arguments is based on the example of language learning, particularly when parents are immigrants and speak a different language than society at large.

Immigrant parents may speak their own language at home, and their children will learn that language and use it when speaking to their parents. However at the same time those children will learn the language of the outside world, because it is the language spoken by the other children who are their peers, and they will adopt the accent, vocabulary, and vocal mannerisms characteristic of those peers.

Harris explained this by pointing out that the ultimate goal of children, the goal that drives their behavior, is not to succeed at home (which they will someday leave), but to succeed in the wider world outside the home. To achieve that goal children emulate other children of their own age or slightly older, modeling their own behavior on theirs. They also categorize themselves in relation to other children, and join peer groups consistent with those categorizations: the studious child becomes a “nerd,” the athletic child allies themself with the “jocks,” and so on.

In modern societies the place where children encounter other children is in school, and therefore the school environment is the primary driver of children’s socialization, together with after-school environments both in-person and (increasingly) online—both of which are often just continuations of school interactions in other contexts.

What roles does this leave for parents, if they wish their children to develop into successful adults? The first possibility is that parents can indirectly help influence their children by the parents’ actions in the larger world. Children emulate older children, who in turn emulate older children still, until children who are almost adults emulate actual adults. Thus the values and attitudes of the parents’ neighborhood and the broader society flow down and become the values and attitudes of children. To the extent that parents can help shape those values and attitudes, they help shape those of their children.

However parents are severely limited in how much they can do. Whatever they themselves can do in the home or in the world is far outweighed by the influence exerted by others. In the final analysis they have little power to stop their children adopting the values and attitudes of their peers, just as immigrant parents cannot stop their children from learning the languages spoken outside the home.

What parents can realistically hope to do is to help determine who their children’s peers are, by their choices of where to live and where to send their children to school. This plays out in various ways depending on the parents’ income.

Wealthy parents have it the easiest: they can afford to live anywhere, and to send their children to exclusive private schools in which they will encounter only other children of the wealthy (and perhaps a few carefully-selected scholarship students).

Parents at the other end of the income spectrum have it the hardest: it is difficult for them to move to places other than where they grew up, and if they are not satisfied with their children’s school experiences then their only hope is that someone else will provide them a no-cost alternative, like the choice of a public school in a different neighborhood or a publicly-funded charter school.

Middle-income parents have a different strategy: They cannot necessarily afford to send their children to private schools, but they are able to move to jurisdictions where the public schools are filled with the children of other middle-income parents with similar values and attitudes. Those other children will then be their own children’s peers and (collectively) the primary influence on their values and attitudes.

This is the dynamic that has played out in Howard County: educated middle-class parents are attracted to the county by housing and job opportunities, and they pass on their talents and personalities to their children. Those children are then successful in Howard County public schools in large part due to those talents and personalities and their reinforcement by the presence of other children with similar talents and personalities. Howard County public schools then get a reputation as “good schools,” yet more educated middle-class parents are attracted to the county based on that reputation, and the cycle begins again.

This would seem to be an entirely positive dynamic, but it has its unfortunate aspects. First, it ties parents’ hopes for their children to the schools they attend, and to the neighborhoods within those school’s attendance boundaries. This makes fights over Howard County school redistricting more divisive than they otherwise might be.

Moving students from one school to another does not just change students’ teachers, it changes the peer groups that determine students’ socialization. Some parents may be concerned about their children being moved to a school with students whose values and attitudes may be different (or at least perceived to be so), and other parents may be concerned about the possibility of such students being moved into their own children’s schools.

This dynamic also makes Howard County less affordable and less open to those pursuing upward mobility. As Howard County becomes more known for its “good schools” (which would be better termed “schools with good students”) that increases the demand for housing, which in the absence of increased housing supply will raise the prices of houses and apartments in the county. This in turn means that the county will become affordable only to those of higher incomes, or in other words people who have the talents and personalities that are a good fit for jobs enabling them to command such incomes.

The Central Branch of the Howard County Library System in downtown Columbia recently hosted an “Undesign the Redline” exhibit tracing the history of legal and corporate attempts to restrict housing opportunities in the United States by race. The library’s hosting the exhibit was consistent with the founding story of Columbia as a “garden for growing people” (to quote its founder Jim Rouse), open to people of all races and income levels.

The experience of Howard County today, now past Columbia’s 50th birthday, shows that it is possible for similar patterns of residential segration to emerge in a more spontaneous manner. Unlike past redlining these new patterns are ostensibly race-neutral (because they are based on household income) and the restrictions on housing supply and housing types that drive them can be justified as supporting worthy goals like preventing school overcrowding, reducing over-development and the influence of developers, ensuring adequate public facilities, preserving open space, and protecting the character of the county and its neighborhoods.

Is it possible to break this cycle, to make Howard County once again affordable to a wider range of people and ensure that Columbia will fulfill Jim Rouse’s vision? That is a longer discussion than this article can contain, but surely part of the solution is to ensure that all Howard County schools are equally attractive to parents, so that some neighborhoods are not disadvantaged relative to others, and that all parents can feel good about the socialization their children will undergo in those schools.

How can schools do this, above and beyond their ostensible function of teaching students academic knowledge that will (supposedly) be useful to them as adults. At a minimum they should provide what we would expect parents to provide: an environment in which students are adequately cared for and are safe from physical and emotional abuse of various kinds, including bullying both off-line and on-line.

We’d also expect schools to provide an environment in which learning of all kinds is supported, and in which students who wish to learn are able to do so without interference or interruption. What can schools do to ensure this? Harris had some relatively unformed ideas about this, and I speculate about this a bit in the next section.

How can schools help children succeed?

Going back to my baseball example, suppose we lived in a country where playing baseball were the only way to succeed in society, with anyone who couldn’t play baseball at a high level unlikely to rise out of poverty. Suppose also that politicians in that country urged children facing such poor prospects to “learn to hit or pitch,” and proposed to help them succeed by providing every child free tuition to baseball camps.

Most people would probably consider this to be an inadequate response to the problem, and such a country to be a less than ideal place for children to grow up. (In fact, there are countries where lack of economic development means that playing baseball is the only way out of poverty. We don’t consider generally consider those countries as models for the US to emulate.)

What does this have to do with child development? In addition to considering personality attributes passed down from parent to child, and socialization of children by their peer environment, Judith Rich Harris also sought to understand why children develop different personalities even in cases (as with identical twins) where we might expect their personalities to be very similar.

In her book No Two Alike Harris argued that the answer to this question lies in children’s quest for status within the groups to which they belong. Per Harris, socialization within peer groups causes children’s values and attitudes to match those of their peers, but achieving higher status requires that they act in ways that make them stand out from their peers.

This in turn drives the evolution of children’s personalities: for example, the child who is studious and rewarded for doing well in academic subjects is motivated to study more, and the child whose extraversion and likeability makes them popular will seek more opportunities to display those attributes and achieve further popularity. This evolution is influenced not just by children’s own personality predispositions, but also by the socialization they receive (e.g., do the child’s peers consider academic or athletic success to be something worth pursuing?) and the opportunities open to them.

Our schools can then be seen not just as an environment for children’s socialization, but also as providing a set of opportunities for children to measure themselves against others and achieve higher status in one way or another. If that set of opportunities is relatively limited then children will seek other ways to achieve status, some of which may not be desirable from the point of view of the school or of society at large.

My tentative conclusion is then that our schools should not be like the countries where baseball is the only path to success. In addition to providing a positive environment for children’s socialization and a grounding in topics everyone should know (mainly basic literacy and numeracy), schools should strive to provide as many opportunities as possible for children to find something they’re good at and pursue the achievement of status in positive ways. Beyond traditional academic subjects for the studious and sports for the athletic, that might include opportunities for students to express themselves through arts of various kinds, to work with their hands, to learn how to run a business, to learn how to care for others, and so on.

Opportunities like this are often a feature of today’s schools, but they exist at the margin, under constant threat of funding cuts (like the arts), seen as less prestigious and desirable (like vocational programs), and in general considered to detract from the primary goal of driving children’s academic achievement as measured by standardized test scores.

Fully implementing the vision above would thus require a total rethinking of the way schools are organized, especially in late middle school and high school, corresponding to the years in which (according to Harris) children develop their adult personalities. It would also require a different way of measuring the success of schools and teachers—or perhaps abandoning the idea of measurement entirely, beyond ensuring that schools meet some base-line goals in terms of providing a safe and supportive environment for students.

Of course such a major rework of schools could not occur in a vacuum. Beyond state and Federal educational policies that might hamper such a change, it’s of no use for schools to offer alternative paths to students if society at large does not value people who take those paths. There must be opportunities and (if needed) support for them to live lives of dignity and worth and to provide for themselves and their families. I addressed this topic in other posts, so I won’t comment further on it here.

Looking to the future

As I mentioned at the beginning, this post is a thought experiment: if Judith Rich Harris was correct then these are some implications for parents, schools, and society. I happen to think her theories are plausible, but at present they are not generally accepted, particularly by the people who are most concerned with child development and who drive education policy.

Could this change, and if so, how long might such a change take? At this point it’s been over twenty years since Harris first laid out her hypotheses and the arguments for them. I suspect it may be almost as long until Harris is definitively proved right or wrong to the satisfaction of most of the people whose opinions count, and perhaps longer than that for her ideas (if correct) to be reflected in education policy.

First, people deemed to be child development experts would have to come to a consensus that children resemble their parents in personality and talents for the same reason they resemble them in appearance. As consumer DNA testing becomes more popular and its applications move beyond those that are primarily ancestry-focused or entertainment-oriented (“wine recommendations . . . scientifically selected based on your DNA”), it’s possible that ordinary people will come to this conclusion before most experts do.

Second, psychologists would need to test and confirm (or disprove) Harris’s ideas regarding children’s socialization and personality development. Right now psychology as a discipline is in the midst of a battle over whether past experiments underlying accepted theories were actually conducted properly,¹ and what if anything needs to be done to put psychological theories on a sounder scientific footing. Resolving these controversies will take some time, and probably depend to a large degree on researcher turnover within the field.

Finally, even if Harris’s ideas come to be accepted by experts and ordinary people alike, policymakers will not respond to those ideas until they have some compelling reason to do so. For now policymakers appear to be committed to the idea that what America needs most are more STEM professionals, that the primary if not only goal of our educational system should be to provide them, and that we can best measure public schools’ success in promoting that goal through students’ scores on standardized tests and their acceptance into four-year colleges and universities.

Policymakers will likely change their minds only if and when that strategy clearly proves insufficient to address the challenges that the Americans will face in the 21st century. I wrote this post in the belief that that day will come.

For further exploration

The best source for information on Judith Rich Harris is the web site judithrichharris.info maintained by her husband Charles Harris. The site includes a biography of Harris and an extensive set of links to articles and related material for her two major works, The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike.

Geting the full flavor of Harris’s argument really requires reading her books, since popular summarizations often distort what she was saying—most notably that she claimed that “parents don’t matter” in any way whatsoever. However if you don’t have time to read the books here are some sources in which Harris defends her theories in her own words:

• “Children Don’t Do Things Half Way.” An interview on the Edge online site in which Harris reviews the arguments of The Nurture Assumption. (See also the Edge retrospective on Harris.)
• “How Many Environments Does a Child Have?.” A reprint of a Harvard Education Letter article in which Harris comments on the role of schools, clasmmates, and teachers in forming children’s personalities.
• “The Nature of Nurture.” A “dialogue” (really, a debate) in Slate magazine between Harris and one of her critics, psychologist Jerome Kagan. Among other things, this highlights Harris’s contrarian and somewhat combative stance vs. the psychology “establishment.”
• “Where is the Child’s Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development.” The 1995 Psychological Review paper in which Harris first set out her theories.

If you do have time to read Harris’s books, the first part of No Two Alike recaps the arguments of The Nurture Assumption, so reading that book alone might seem like a shortcut. However some people might not like the way No Two Alike is structured (like a mystery novel), and the book omits the in-depth discussion in The Nurture Assumption of how Harris came to believe that conventional theories of child development were incorrect.

Finally, those who like Malcolm Gladwell’s popularizations can read his New Yorker profile of Harris, “Do Parents Matter?” written on the eve of publication of The Nurture Assumption.

tl;dr: The Niskanen Center promotes a pro-market pro-government vision for the center-right, but I think the sales pitch needs to be tweaked to get at least some conservative voters to buy it.

What’s my beef with the Niskanen Center?

I know the Niskanen Center (having read its blog for the past few years). I like many of the Niskanen Center’s policy recommendations (see my “seven answers” series). I even donate to the Niskanen Center. So why I am writing this long blog post (gently) chastising the Niskanen Center? For the answer read on (but feel free to skip over the next section or two if you already know the material).

The Niskansen Center advertises itself as “a moderate, nonpartisan think tank that works to promote an open society and change public policy through direct engagement in the policymaking process.” In other words, it’s engaged in the political equivalent of what we in the IT business call “enterprise sales”: trying to get high-level decision makers to buy what you’re selling and implement it in their organizations.

Recently the Niskanen Center has stepped up its sales efforts, releasing a white paper laying out a comprehensive vision “that sees government and market as complements rather than antagonists” and proposes a “new synthesis [to] help move our divided society toward the best version of itself and away from the toxic tribalism that afflicts us today.” The Center also sponsored a one-day conference “Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump” featuring various conservative and libertarian thinkers, with a special guest appearance by our own Governor Larry Hogan.

Is the Niskanen Center pursuing an effective sales strategy? If not, how could it be improved? And why as a lifelong Democrat would I be interested in their success, especially if the result is to improve the future electoral fortunes of the Republican Party?

Why be a moderate in a two-party system?

It’s clear that the Niskanen Center sensibility has no natural home in a two-party system driven by winner-take-all elections and prone to polarization. In the US the only strategy open to the Center is to attempt to have its preferred policies adopted by either the Democratic or Republican Party.

As it happens many of those policies, including proposals for universal health care and other forms of social insurance, are more compatible with the positions of Democratic elected officials and their voters. So why is the Niskanen Center trying to cultivate support from Republicans and promoting a hoped-for moderate makeover of the Republican Party?

Leaving aside the past “fusionism” that saw libertarians ally with conservatives, a more plausible reason for its outreach to Republicans is simple electoral math: The structure of the US Senate and Republican domination of small rural states makes it very likely that Republicans will maintain control of the Senate for the foreseeable future, or will at least be able to block Democratic legislation if they vote as a unified bloc.

Advancing the Niskanen Center’s preferred policies (many of which are my preferred policies) will thus require gaining the support of at least some Republican legislators willing to go against conservative orthodoxy. Hence it’s joining with others in the quest to revive that almost-extinct species, the “moderate Republican” (and hence my interest as a Democrat in that quest).

Civilization vs. the barbarians

But how likely is it that moderate Republicanism can be revived? Larry Hogan won re-election by a substantial margin, and is now being feted by some Republicans looking for an alternative candidate in 2020. However I suspect that Hogan would not make it out of a Republican presidential primary anywhere in the US, including Maryland.

On the flip side, in the affluent, educated, suburban/exurban jurisdiction of Howard County, Maryland (traditionally a swing district), self-proclaimed “independent leader” and Hogan ally Allan Kittleman saw his own brand of moderate Republicanism go down to defeat at the hands of progressive African American Democrat Calvin Ball.

Hogan’s problem will likely be that he won’t be perceived as conservative enough by most Republican voters. Kittleman’s problem was possibly that when he attempted to adopt a more conservative position, as in his opposition to so-called “sanctuary” legislation for Howard County, it turned off some Democratic voters who might otherwise have been inclined to give him a second term.

I think the Niskanen Center, and those Republican candidates influenced by it, will have a similar problem. To diagnose it further I’ll enlist the help of Arnold Kling’s model of the three axes (or languages) of politics:

Due to its libertarian background the Niskanen Center has no problem speaking the language of libertarians where appropriate. Per Kling the preferred libertarian framing is that of the state vs. those subject to state coercion. The Niskanen Center’s promotion of the free market and support for reducing excessive government regulation plays right into that framing.

The Niskanen Center policy vision also at times echoes the preferred framing of progressives (per Kling), of the oppressed seeking to escape oppression and overthrow their oppressors. For example, the paper argues that “regardless of the justice of our contemporary rules, people’s capacities, social standing, and social capital are inheritances of previous rules that may have been profoundly unjust.”

However it’s hard to find in the Niskanen Center policy vision the framing that Kling claims is preferred by conservatives, namely that of a civilization under assault by barbarians and defending itself against them. This is especially true when we consider culture with a capital “C,” as in “Western Culture” or “American Culture.” (The word “culture” nowhere appears in the Niskanen policy vision paper.)

The Republican Party seems to have committed itself to a particular ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. barbarians” framing, one that has resonated with many of its voters, portraying a white Christian civilization under attack by those who are non-white and/or non-Christian. This framing drives the political positions and electoral strategies of a host of Republican candidates, from local offices to the highest office in the land, particularly when it comes to immigration—the very issue driving the partial shutdown of the US government as I write.

This framing harks back (in one form or another) to Reconstruction and the antebellum nativist movement. The Niskanen Center, along with like-minded others, implicitly dismisses it as a nativist fantasy and attempts to counter it through cold hard facts, as in its “Guide to Answering Ten Commonly Asked Questions on Immigration.” But the ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing is resistant to such an approach, relying as it does on a way of looking at the world that is congenial to conservatives and thus easily exploited by conservative candidates seeking electoral office.

I think the better approach is not to dismiss the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing out of hand. Rather I’ll try to interrogate it more closely, to see if a different version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing could be created to make the Niskanen Center vision more congenial to conservatives. In this I’m motivated by the words of the vision paper itself, that “we have an obligation to try to justify our beliefs in terms [our fellow citizens] can recognize.”

Cultural distance and American exceptionalism

In exploring the question of reinterpreting the Niskanen Center vision in a conservative framing, let’s start with the concept of “American culture”: a set of “socially communicated practices and beliefs” (to use Arnold Kling’s definition) characteristic of Americans. American culture is typically portrayed by conservatives as being derived from (white) European Christendom, and conservative political rhetoric often implies that it is not or cannot be shared by the non-white or non-Christian.

As is often the case, reality is more complicated, at least according to researchers studying cultural evolution and attempting to formulate better measures of cultural and psychological “distance” between countries. The construction of such measures is quite technical, but the basic concept is relatively simple to understand:

Consider a representative sample of Americans answering questions about their various beliefs: “How important is family to you?” “How often do you attend church?” “How much do you trust strangers?” and so on. For a given question the surveyed Americans will likely vary in their answers, but there will be a “typical” answer and some variation around the typical answer.¹

Now consider the same question asked of people in another country. Again this will produce a typical answer and variation in the answers. Finally, combine their answers to the question with those of Americans, looking at the typical answer and variation in the answers of the two countries’ respondents considered as a single group.

In some cases, as with American and Canadian respondents, the typical answer and variation in answers in the combined sample may differ very little from the typical answer and variation in answers produced by the American respondents alone. With another country (call it “X”) there might be significant differences in the combined answers and the American-only answers: country X’s respondents may have a different typical answer to the question, and/or their answers to the question may vary more or less than those of the American respondents.

These smaller or larger differences can then be used to calculate a measure of “cultural distance” between the US and another country relative to that particular question.² This cultural distance value will be close to zero for a country like Canada in our example, but larger for our example country X.

Now consider not a single question but a survey consisting of many questions, covering an entire range of attitudes and beliefs. The answers to this set of questions can be used to calculate a single value of cultural distance between the US and another country, which the researchers refer to as CF _ST .³

The graph above shows the cultural distances (CF _ST values) from the United States to each of a selected group of other countries, as calculated using answers to the questions on the World Values Survey.⁴ The cultural distance from the US to a given country can be roughly interpreted as the percentage of variation between the US and that country relative to the total variation within the two countries considered together.

Some of the results of those calculations accord with the ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing: Canada is the closest country to the US by this measure, followed by other countries in the Anglosphere, while the countries furthest in cultural distance from the US are those with Muslim majorities. Other results are less consistent with this framing: for example, by this measure Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico are closer culturally to the US than European countries like France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

(Ethno-nationalists might interpret this as evidence of the effect of Hispanic migration to the US. However this seems contradicted by the small cultural distance between the US and Canada, which has a very small Hispanic population—on the order of 1-2%. Alternately they might claim that extensive Muslim immigration is driving European countries further away in cultural distance from the US. Again this seems implausible, as Great Britain, a country with a Muslim population percentage as high as Germany and almost as high as France or the Netherlands, is at almost the same cultural distance from the US as New Zealand, a country with a very small Muslim population—again on the order of 1-2%.)

Another point is that even for countries maximally culturally distant from the US, variation between those countries and the US is a relatively small fraction (less than a quarter in the most extreme case) of the variation within the countries considered together. The typical resident in such countries will have attitudes and beliefs significantly different than those of a typical American, but even in such culturally distant countries there’s likely to be a significant number of people whose attitudes and beliefs are consistent with those of mainstream American culture.

I’ll revisit this point below, but I first want to consider a different question: Why is American culture (and by extension Anglosphere and European culture) relatively exceptional relative to the cultures of other countries, and what implications does that have for the “civilization vs. the barbarians” conservative framing?

How the Church created liberal democracy

Part of the ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing promoted by many conservative politicians is that American culture, and Western culture in general, is inextricably linked to European ancestry and the Christian religion. In contrast, the same researchers responsible for the measure of culture distance discussed above also argue that Western culture and its associated psychology are simply due to an odd accident of history.

Their hypothesis, supported by considerable evidence, is that the typical psychology of those living in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries has its ultimate roots in the decisions of the leaders of the Catholic Church in late antiquity to enact strict prohibitions on marriage between couples related even to the slightest degree.

These prohibitions had the affect of breaking up traditional social arrangements based on kinship within extended families. The resulting changes in culture favored those people who had a more individualist outlook, who owed less to their extended families and more to the efforts of themselves and their immediate families, and who were able to cooperate with unrelated others for their mutual benefit.

The three graphs above represent a small part of this argument. The first graph shows that present-day individualism in various countries (as measured by the Hofstede scale) tends to be less in countries with a previously high intensity of kin-based institutions (as measured by the Kinship Intensity Index). The second graph shows that the same lessening of individualism is present in countries with a higher prevalence of marriage between cousins. Finally, the third graph shows that individualism tends to be higher in countries that have had more centuries of exposure to the Western (Catholic) church.

If true this hypothesis has some interesting implications. In particular it implies that what are thought to be unique characteristics of Western culture—greater individualism, creativity, trust in strangers, impersonal cooperation and altruism, and lessened obedience, conformity, and traditionalism—have little or nothing to do with actual Christian beliefs. (Among other things this is implied by the experiences of countries like Russia that have been primarily exposed to the Eastern church, the theology of which does not differ significantly from that of the Western church.)

This also implies that there is no inherent reason why countries with non-Christian and/or non-white majorities that are currently more culturally distant from the US could not have developed—or might yet develop—cultures more similar to those of the US and other Western countries, if kinship arrangements in those countries had been (or are in future) similarly altered to emphasize nuclear families as opposed to extended ones.

Rethinking the civilization/barbarian axis

What are the implications of the research discussed above for the “civilization vs. the barbarians” conservative framing? Who in this conception are the real barbarians, and what is the civilization that conservatives—and everyone else—should be called upon to defend?

Here I rely on the thesis put forth by Mark Weiner: that the only alternative to the modern liberal state is “a form of governance that unites a radically decentralized constitutional structure with a culture of group honor and shame . . . and makes the extended family the constitutive unit of society, politics, and law.” In other words, the rule of the clan.

By breaking the bonds of kinship formed by intermarriage within an extended family, the Catholic Church arguably created the preconditions for the emergence of a liberal order that valorized individual autonomy, had some concept of the public interest (as distinct from clan interests), and based governance on a set of impersonal institutions that (at least in theory) existed for the benefit of everyone equally. In other words, the rule of law.

We can see what the rule of the clan looks like by looking at other countries around the world, especially those culturally distant from the US. We can also look into the past, at the European societies that emerged from the rule of the clan. The painting above shows one example: a staged battle in which men from two Scottish clans butchered one another over some matter or other touching on their clans’ honor.

According to Weiner, as the rule of the clan recedes the bonds of extended kinship lose their power over the individual but live on in benign form as part of individuals’ cultural heritages, one way in which they situate themselves within society and in the story of humanity. As shown in the photograph above, a group of Scots marching together is no longer a sight to be feared by their clan’s enemies, but simply an occasion for people to express pride in their heritage.

The barbarism we should combat is thus not clannishness as family feeling but anti-social clannishness, that prioritizes clan over country and the interests of one’s fellow Americans. (By “anti-social” I of course mean this in American terms. In a clan-based society it would be anti-social not to put your own clan’s interests above others.)

This anti-social clannishness comes in many forms: the criminal gangs bound by ties of family and ethnicity; the terrorists who kill and maim others in the name of ethnic and religious solidarity; the parents who kill their children for perceived violations of family honor; the businesspeople who think nothing of cheating and defrauding those of different ethnic groups or religions; and (last but not least) the demagogues who promise to support “the people” but instead use their political positions to enrich themselves and their families.

In this framing the civilization that we seek to protect from barbarism is that of the rule of law, of individual autonomy, of “free minds and free markets,” of peaceful toleration of those with whom we disagree, and of a public interest broadly defined to encompass the needs and desires of all Americans, no matter their heritage or station in life.

How might this alternative framing, what I’ll call “rule of law conservatism” or “anti-clan conservatism,” play out in term of policy? In particular, can we talk about immigration policy in a way that is consistent with both the Niskanen Center vision and with this different framing?

The immigrants we want

Those who lobby for immigration restrictions characterize their opponents as advocating for “open borders.” Immigration supporters object to this, and rightly so, because very few people argue for no restrictions on immigration at all.

However I think the “open borders” charge is politically effective because it captures a common feeling: that beyond a few limited cases (like denying entry to criminals and suspected terrorists) immigration supporters are perceived as being unwilling to make judgements, particularly moral judgements, about which immigrants we want to attract to the US and which we don’t.

The ethno-nationalist version of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” framing offers a simple and politically potent response to this, designating some countries as unacceptable sources for immigrants based on their being non-white and/or non-Christian.

The alternative “rule of law vs. anti-social clannishness” framing, combined with the research I’ve cited, may offer a alternative approach: Given the amount of variety in cultural attitudes within each country, even in those countries culturally distant from the US, there are likely to be many people around the world whose attitudes, beliefs, and personalities are “American-like,” and who would therefore make good US citizens.

In fact, it may even be in the more culturally distant countries where we might find the best candidates for US citizenship. Any “American-like” people in those countries will likely feel all the more strongly the cultural gap between themselves and their countries’ dominant cultures, and will likely be the most motivated to assimilate to American culture as immigrants. In other words, they will be the people most “yearning to breathe free.”

We also can infer from the cited research that being non-white or non-Christian is not in and of itself an inherent obstacle to being a good American. What really matters is that prospective immigrants not be predisposed to anti-social clannishness that violates American norms and is inconsistent with American culture.

So how would this alternative framing cause us to rethink US immigration policy? Or would it necessarily?

For example, the Niskanen Center has defended the lottery-based “diversity visa” program, partly on the basis that in practice those admitted under the program do better than other immigrants. It’s likely that those who are most attracted to the American way of life, and most predisposed to be compatible with it, are going to be the most motivated to jump through the many hoops that entrance under that program requires.

In another example, US family-based immigration policy already prioritizes uniting of nuclear families over uniting extended families. It’s not immediately clear to me how it could be tweaked to further discourage immigration by those predisposed to anti-social clannish behavior.

It’s possible that what is needed with US immigration policy is not a major overhaul (although there may be useful reforms that could be made). It may simply be that we need a different way of talking about immigration: that we can and should have clear criteria about who to admit to the US as immigrants and who not to admit, but that such criteria should consistent with a “rule of law vs. anti-social clannishness” framing as opposed to an ethno-nationalist framing.

This also implies that we should not be shy about valuing and promoting a common American culture and identity based on freedom, individualism, and the liberal order. This culture and identity can and should ultimately take priority over the many ethnic, religious, and other cultures and identities to which individual Americans belong.

As the Niskanen Center vision paper notes, “the liberal democratic capitalist welfare state [is] the best model of governance ever devised, producing the richest, healthiest, best-educated societies that ever existed.” But I think the Niskanen Center needs to go further and recognize that the liberal democratic capitalist welfare state exists only because Americans, and others like us, have a particular culture that makes it possible for such a state to emerge and flourish, and that the continued existence of that state is dependent on our willingness to promote and defend that culture.

This I think is the missing piece in the Niskanen Center vision, one that may help it justify its policy program to conservatives, just as the Center has acknowledged the concerns of libertarians and progressives and tried to justify its vision to them in terms they can recognize.

It’s possible, if not likely, that this reframing of the “civilization vs. the barbarians” axis will not attract the support of most conservative politicians and voters, that they will still be wedded to a framing based on ethno-nationalism.

But if even a few conservative politicians can win electoral success campaigning on an alternative vision of America, that may be enough to implement the Niskanen Center’s preferred policies in alliance with those from the other side of the aisle. The Niskanen Center seems to be playing a long game, and in that game even the smallest of advantages may be the key to ultimate victory.

For further exploration

For more on the Niskanen Center and its policy vision, see the following:

• Niskanen Center Conspectus lays out in more detail the goals and strategy of the Center, based on its theory of policy change as “a product of intense insider activity to overcome profound status quo biases in the political system—biases that are not easily moved by external political pressure or material resources.”
• “The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes,” by Brink Lindsey, Will Wilkinson, Steve Teles, and Samuel Hammond, attempts to combine the Niskanen Center’s various policy positions into a single coherent vision that “rejects the false dichotomy between ‘big’ and ‘small’ government and combines the best aspects of the ‘pro-market’ right and the ‘pro-government’ left.”
• “Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump” was a one-day conference exploring “political prospects for a new center-right, and the policy ideas and ideals that can revitalize the post-Trump Republican Party.” Among other things, it featured a welcoming address by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. Unfortunately there are no transcripts for the conference audio, and no audio for Hogan’s remarks.
• “Is Hogan the antidote to Trumpism?,” by Josh Kurtz for Maryland Matters, and “Maryland’s Hogan speaks to GOP dissenters looking for alternative to Trump,” by Ovetta Wiggins and David Weigel for the Washington Post, report on Hogan’s appearance at the “Starting Over” conference and the part he might play in a potential future Republican Party more receptive to the Niskanen Center’s ideas.
• “A Guide to Answering Ten Commonly Asked Questions on Immigration” and the various policy briefs on immigration provide a comprehensive picture of the Niskanen Center’s views on immigration and related issues.

The following are a representative sampling of reactions to the Niskanen Center policy vision:

• “A new center being born: The market and the welfare state go together” by David Brooks for the New York Times. In one of the most enthusiastic responses to the paper, Brooks writes that he “felt liberated to see the world in fresh new ways, and not only in the ways I’ve always seen them or the way people with my label are supposed to see them.”
• “What would a responsible center-right party do?” by Jennifer Rubin for the Washington Post. Rubin writes that “[The paper’s] greatest contribution might be in its recognition that ‘small government’ is a slogan and a canard, and too much effort in the right is spent (intentionally or not) on policies that inhibit widespread prosperity.”
• “I have seen the future of a Republican party that is no longer insane” by Jonathan Chait for New York magazine. Chait writes that “[The paper] synthesizes two years of heresies into an impressively coherent approach to governing,” with the Niskanen Center “operating from the starting point of what a well-functioning right-of-center party ought to stand for, rather than how the current one can be tweaked.”
• “The Niskanen Center is a splendid policy shop, but it is not the future of the Republican Party,” by Jeet Heer for The New Republic. Heer claims that the Republican party will not find the Center’s vision compatible with its base’s desire for “culture-war theater, white nationalism and tax cuts.”

The following sources provide background for my comments on modifying the Niskanen Center to make it more attractive to conservatives:

• “Culture Matters” by Virginia Postrel for Econlib. Postrel argues that libertarians and classical liberals do not understand culture but need to learn more about how it works and evolves.
• “It is sometimes appropriate . . .” is a blog post by Arnold Kling in which he (to my knowledge) first set out his model of political discourse, including conservatives’ use of the “civilization/barbarian” axis. Kling later expanded his thoughts into a book, The Three Languages of Politics.
• “Beyond WEIRD Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance” by Michael Muthukrishna, et.al., is a preprint of a paper outlining an approach to measuring cultural distance between countries based on their inhabitants’ responses to the World Values Survey. See also the web site culturaldistance.com for supplemental material.
• “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology by Jonathan Schulz, et.al., argues that the “peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD)” in part “arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions.”
• “The Catholic Church, Kin Networks and Institutional Development” by Jonathan Schulz. In this “job market paper” building on “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology,” Schulz extends the argument that the “Catholic Church’s medieval marriage policies dissolved extended kin networks and thereby fostered inclusive institutions.”
• The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom by Mark Weiner discusses governmental institutions in societies dominated by kinship-based clans, and how such societies can evolve to become liberal societies based on individualism and the rule of law. Weiner summarizes his argument and applies it to geopolitics in his article “The Call of the Clan” for Foreign Policy.

I’ve now completed my series of posts addressing the questions put forth by Jason Booms in his article “Seven Questions.” In going back and looking at prior posts I had some additional thoughts, which I present here as my final take on these issues (at least for now).

But first, a meta-comment: Jason didn’t create his questions to motivate me to write about my political beliefs. He did it as a way to evaluate the positions of candidates for Howard County political offices. But did candidates’ positions on this set of issues really make any difference in the election? I don’t know the answer, but I’d certainly be interested in hearing Jason’s thoughts on this.

Wealth inequality

I had two thoughts after writing my post on wealth inequality:

First, a commenter on a libertarian site once made the argument to me that what people objected to was not differences in economic circumstances, i.e., income and wealth inequality, but differences in political power, i.e., being politically dominated by others. It’s an argument that comes naturally to libertarians, of course, but I agree that it seems plausible.

For example, most people likely think of Warren Buffett as a folksy grandfather-like figure, not as someone whose personal wealth is equal to that of a substantial fraction of the US population. The billionaires who excite popular resentment are instead those like George Soros and the Koch brothers who are very active in and identified with particular political causes and parties.

Why this should this be so? I have my own ideas, but for now I’ll simply say that I’m skeptical of narratives around economic inequality that see politics on the issue as driven primarily by resentment of the wealthy for their wealth itself.

Second, I suspect one corrosive aspect of wealth inequality relates to the incentives it provides to engage in corruption and general bad behavior. Consider a game played by 100 people, a game whose outcome is generally due to relative luck and skill, but which can also be influenced by underhanded tactics and outright cheating.

Suppose the prize for the bottom 90 finishers is $50,000, for the next 9 finishers is $250,000, and for the overall winner is $1.25 million. Now increase the second prize from $250,000 to $500,000, and the top prize from $1.25 million to $5 million.

It seems fairly self-evident that the incentives for cheating would be higher in the second scenario than the first. Those whose personalities already predispose them to cheat will receive significantly greater rewards but presumably suffer no greater chance of getting punished for cheating.

I think the same dynamic operates in human societies at large as wealth inequality increases. In fact, the motivation to cheat and engage in corrupt activities is probably even greater, since winners can use their rewards to greatly lessen their chances of punishment, either by buying off those in power or by acquiring political power themselves.

I don’t believe that these consequences of wealth inequality are fatal to a society, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many countries with very high Gini coefficients (e.g., Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, etc.) are also marked by relatively high levels of political instability and corrupt authoritarianism.¹

Social democracy

Regarding my post about social democracy, events continue to prove my point that in American discourse the word “socialism” is used primarily to score political points, without any real understanding of what it means in practice.

I think this will ultimately be to the detriment of those using “socialism” as a slur: If people’s understanding of “capitalism” is that you can’t afford health care and experience ongoing job insecurity, stagnant wages, and unemployment then I think it will erode support for the free market and even liberal democracy in general. It may then take another Roosevelt to save capitalism from itself.

I’ll also note that after last Tuesday’s 2018 gubernatorial election a Republican will still be governor of Maryland, and hark back to my speculation about Maryland legislators making a deal to increase social insurance programs in return for reducing excessive regulations on businesses and individuals. I don’t think this will actually happen, but I still think it would be a justifiable bargain. (I may blog later about what I consider one particular bit of Maryland regulatory overreach.)

Racial equality

I don’t have much to add to my post on racial equality. This election showed the importance of voting and of working against vote suppression, and the experience of Baltimore shows the importance of policing and crime in shaping the prospects for a city and its people.

Liberty and equality

I think one thing lacking in my liberty and equality post was talking more about immigration, the distinctions we make between those who are our fellow citizens and those who are not (or at least are not yet), and what it means to be an American.

Immigration is one of those topics where the heart rules the head. Think tanks and academics can issue all the pronouncements they wish regarding whether immigrants are a net benefit to the economy, whether they harm employment prospects for some already-resident Americans, or whether they are associated with increased crime and terrorism.²

However in the end the emotional aspects of immigration hold greater sway: On the right we have the belief that immigrants (especially unauthorized ones) are invaders taking our jobs, threatening our safety, and (in more extreme imaginings) aiding “white genocide.” On the left we have a vision of immigration of all kinds (authorized or not) as a way to rescue the oppressed, build a vibrant multicultural society and (again, in more extreme visions) overthrow “white hegemony.”

Here’s where I stand on all that: First, I believe that national identity is both real and important to most people. (It certainly is to me.) National identity in the sense I mean is driven by

• shared life experiences both small (e.g., school life) and large (e.g., wars, political upheavals, cultural touchstones, etc.);
• national narratives (“stories nations tell themselves”) and one’s participation in them;
• national stereotypes that serve as examplars by which people model their behavior;³ and
• in-group markers like language and accent, religion, style of dress, food preferences, etc.

Except for the last none of these is necessarily associated with membership in a particular ethnic group, and even there the “Americanization” process turns many ethnic markers into the common property of all Americans. (For example, consider pizza, hot dogs, and sushi.) In short, although America as a nation originated from the experiences of particular ethnic groups (primarily the English), it by no means is—or should be—an “ethno-state.”

Why is having a coherent shared national identity important? Because it forms a critical component of self-identity, co-existing with and to some extent subsuming more particular personal identities formed around ethnicity, religion, ideologies, etc. As such one’s national identity creates a sense of “fictive kinship” that helps foster both small- and large-scale social, economic, and political cooperation.

Coming back to immigration, it seems to me that the proper approach is one that is proactive rather than reactive (i.e., is deliberately and consciously designed in service to agreed-upon goals) and that maintains and strengthens national identity in the sense outlined above, while still providing us with the cultural and economic benefits that immigrants can bring as new Americans. I don’t have space or energy here to comment further, but I don’t think either ethnonationalism or multiculturalism (at least in its more extreme forms) are up to this task.

Class warfare

Regarding my class warfare post, after the run-up to and aftermath of the recent elections I have to say that Peter Turchin’s ideas about elite competition are looking more relevant every day.

I follow a relatively small number of people on Twitter, but they cover a fairly wide range of political views and include both local people I know and people active in national politics and media. What they tweet and retweet is a window into the political preoccupations of elites in conflict and how ordinary people get caught up in them. Even why I agree with the sentiments expressed, it’s apparent that the topics tweeted about—and the anger and outrage associated with them—are just as much calculated to secure one elite faction or another a political advantage as to address genuine problems.

But enough cynicism: I conclude by linking to two proposals intended to address the problem of elite overproduction and elite political conflict: Lee Drutman’s articles on greatly increasing the size of the US House of Representatives and reducing the effects of gerrymandering through multimember legislative districts. Both are good ideas to keep in mind for that future time when competing elites have fought each other to the point of exhaustion and are willing to consider fundamental changes to political institutions.

Gender equality

Having exhausted myself writing comments for other sections, I have nothing further to add to my post on gender equality.

LGBTQIA equality

I don’t have much more to say on LGBTQIA equality at this point other than to highlight the outcome of the Massachusetts Question 3 referendum.

The final vote in favor of Question 3 (that is, for retaining gender identity in non-discrimination legislation) was 67.8%, versus 32.2% opposed. To my knowledge this is the first state-wide election focused on gender identity issues, and the supermajority win is a good omen—especially compared with the results of early referendums on marriage-related questions.

On the flip side, the not-quite-68% support compares to the 71-73% support for Question 3 in pre-election polls and (especially) the estimated 80% of Massachusetts adults favoring LGBT non-discrimination laws in the 2017 PRRI American Values Atlas survey. It looks as if support in terms of votes was slightly softer than support in polls, possibly due to lower turnout among young voters. It also appears that of those people polled who described themselves as undecided or refused to answer, pretty much all of them ultimately voted against Question 3.

This has implications for other states: It may be that the 12-13% difference between the Massachusetts PRRI estimate and the ballot result means that the PRRI-estimated support for LGBT non-discrimination laws needs to be at least 63% or higher in a given state in order for LGBTQIA activists to have a reasonable chance of winning a state-wide referendum on including gender identity in those laws.

(States at or just above that threshold include Arkansas, Kentucky, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. States just below it include Lousiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia.)

That’s all I have to say on these issues for now. I now know better than to pre-announce what I’m planning to write about next, or to give any sort of timeframe for when I’ll do so. But if you’re interested in the sorts of things I write about please check back here every month or two, or follow me on Twitter at @hecker to see announcements of new posts.

tl;dr: The struggle for marriage equality provides guidance for how the longer-term campaign for LGBTQIA equality might go.

In the concluding post in my series outlining my answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms, I address Jason’s seven and final question:

Many LGBTQIA Americans have expressed concerns that the current Administration (and those who view the world similarly) are dedicated to rolling back recent legal protections fought for, and recognized, in this country. What steps can and should be taken to safeguard the rights of LGBTQIA citizens to participate fully in the “pursuit of happiness” stated in our Declaration of Independence?

First, to repeat my previous disclaimer: questions like this should first and foremost be addressed by people who are most directly affected by the issues under discussion, namely LGBTQIA¹ people. I’m writing here not because I have any special knowledge of or connection to these issues, but as one voter among many who will be asked to weigh candidates’ positions.

Minority rights and majority opinions

Having said that, to discern how the rights of LGBTQIA people might be best secured in the future we can look to the past. In particular, the movement for marriage equality in the US was remarkably successful in achieving its aims, and over a relatively short time period at that.

As shown in the graphs above, as recently as 2004 no state had a majority in support of marriage equality, with support in most states below 30%. Fast-forwarding to 2017, only a few states have less than majority support for marriage equality, with many states having a solid majority in favor (60% or greater) and a few a supermajority (70% or greater).² In total there were 26 states with a solid majority or supermajority of support. These states represented almost two-thirds of the US population.

It’s worth noting that the shift from minority to majority support appears to have occurred sometime in 2012 or 2013. That was the same period in which (after a long string of defeats) the movement for marriage equality achieved its first successes at the ballot box, with referendum victories in November 2012 affirming marriage equality legislation in Maine, Maryland, and Washington, and rejecting a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Minnesota.

It’s a commonplace saying that “we can’t put protection of civil rights to a majority vote” (and in fact Julia McCready said just that a few months ago). This is indeed true as a ideal. However, in practice exercising one’s rights requires a majority willing to support or at least countenance that, whether that be directly via referendums, indirectly via the actions of elected legislators, or even more indirectly by society’s acceptance of decisions by unelected judges.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the movement for marriage equality picked up momentum after the electoral victories of November 2012 made it clear that there was an emerging majority of Americans willing to vote in support of LGBTQIA people.

So, the first tentative thought I have is this: There are bound to be elections in which LGBTQIA rights become an issue, directly, indirectly, or sometimes both. For example, recall past political campaigns when opponents of LGBTQIA rights sought to use referendums on marriage equality and related issues to increase the turnout of voters likely to support socially conservative candidates.

Given that, it’s arguably counterproductive to focus primarily on securing favorable judicial rulings or administrative regulations—rulings or regulations that can be overturned or rescinded when new judges and new administrations come on the scene. If there are elections that need to be won, whether that’s to elect supporters of LGBTQIA rights or to win straight-up “yes/no” referendums on LGBTQIA questions, the focus will need to be on securing the majority support needed to win them.

When marriage equality supporters were successful in winning such elections, as in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington, it made it clear to people in other states, to legislators, and to judges that support of marriage equality was not a fringe opinion that could be ignored. I think this is generalizable to LGBTQIA rights in general.

Of course, the key here is actually winning such elections—but before I discuss that topic, a brief detour into a larger question: what is or should be the goal of the fight for LGBTQIA rights?

Reform vs. revolution

There are LGBTQIA activists who believe that the focus on marriage equality was a strategic mistake, an unfortunate distraction from the real problems facing the LGBTQIA community. For example, rather than focusing on marriage as a way to secure health care for LGBTQIA couples, they believe energy would have been better spent on lobbying for a universal health care scheme not tied to marriage or employment.

From their point of view marriage is simply “a tool of social control used by governments to regulate sexuality and family formation by establishing a favored form and rewarding it” (as Dean Spade and Craig Willse claim), and marriage equality a cause favored by a “few wealthy foundations and [the] donors who fund them . . .—the gay 1%” that does little to address the true needs of the “queer and trans 99%-ers.”

This conflict regarding goals echoes the historical split among gay rights activists between “liberationists” and “assimiliationists,” which in turn echoes the age-old conflict between revolutionaries and reformers:

Is working to improve and reshape existing institutions a reasonable and realistic approach to effecting desired social changes, or is it simply a form of “respectability politics” in which a favored few gain access to power structures by accepting society’s norms, leaving more marginalized groups outside in the cold?

As is probably apparent from my earlier posts in this series, I’m a reformer at heart. Nevertheless I think the challenge issued by the revolutionaries and liberationists deserves an answer. Here is mine:

First, many of the criticisms of LGBTQIA opponents of marriage equality are on point: health care benefits should indeed be universal and not tied to marriage, there is a need to recognize alternative family arrangements in cases where marriage is not suitable (for example, with a caregiver caring for a friend), and so on. They are also correct that marriage equality is fundamentally a socially conservative change—a point also made by marriage equality advocate Andrew Sullivan.

However, I don’t believe that means that the marriage equality movement was misguided. It’s possible to believe, for example, that universal health care is a desired goal, and to work toward that goal, while at the same time believing that locking LGBTQIA couples and families out of existing health care arrangements is an injustice that should be corrected. If we still don’t have a workable universal health care system (and we don’t), I don’t believe the reason is that LGBTQIA activists got distracted.

Second, even though marriage equality privileges a certain type of social relationship, namely a monogamous partnership between two people, it does make legal recognition and (by implication) social endorsement of that relationship open to everyone, regardless of the sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender presentation of the two individuals entering into it.

Suppose civil unions had been instituted as a parallel structure to civil marriage, and consider the situation of transgender people in particular. Think of the gatekeeping and insults to personal dignity that would have occurred in determining who would be entitled to “real marriage” instead of being relegated to the perceived second-class status of civil unions. In this sense marriage equality was a more radical change than many might credit.

Finally, whatever the factors driving sexual orientation and gender identity, they seem to operate relatively randomly across the entire population, so that we’d expect LGBTQIA people to have roughly the same range of personalities and political predispositions as anyone else. In other words, the phrase “gay Republican” is not an oxymoron, and the support for marriage equality from both progressives and conservatives is not that surprising.

Although the marriage equality movement was in large part funded by rich white gay men, and one of its most visible symbols (Edith Windsor of United States v. Windsor) was a rich white lesbian, I don’t believe that means that marriage equality was simply by elites and for elites. I suspect that there were many ordinary LGBTQIA couples, perhaps even the majority, who were not interested in progressive political activism but simply wanted to be married. For them the “conservatism” of marriage equality was not a bug but a feature.

My conclusion: the successful fight for marriage equality was a major step forward in according LGBTQIA people a greater level of respect and furthering their inclusion in society. I think the most fruitful way forward will be to work for incremental reforms that can potentially benefit all people (for example, universal health care) and at the same time work to make sure that LGBTQIA people can benefit from those reforms to the same extent as anyone else.

But in the end I think it will all come down to winning elections, so that’s the topic I turn to next.

Shared values and the persuadable middle

What accounted for the increase in support for marriage equality shown in the graph above? Part of it may have been a matter of younger and more socially liberal voters replacing an older cohort of voters. Part of it may have been increased visibility of LGBTQIA people in the national culture—the “Will and Grace effect.”

However, the political scientists I’ve read seem to agree that something more was going on: that the changes seen in marriage equality support were too rapid to be accounted for by voter replacement and increased cultural visibility. Wins in referendums and other elections ultimately require persuading individuals and changing their minds, and somehow a significant number of people did in fact change their minds.

There’s another way to look at it, one that’s perhaps more relevant to today’s conflicts and controversies: For many years the tried and true strategy of gay rights opponents was to demonize gay men and lesbians, to portray them as unnatural and alien, and to peddle scare stories about the terrible consequences that would ensue in the absence of laws and social norms that discriminated against them—essentially the same playbook we see used today against transgender people.

That playbook provided to be very effective, as gay rights opponents racked up a series of electoral victories through the 1990s and 2000s. Demonization and scare stories were working very well—and then in 2012 they stopped working, as voters in multiple states ignored the fearmongering and decided to cast their votes for marriage equality. Why was that?

It’s always dangerous to single out one factor in victory or defeat, but based on my reading it appears that the answer was in marriage equality campaigns shifting their messaging: They moved (and felt they needed to move) from “previous messaging which focused on the ‘rights and benefits’ of marriage and on the notion of equality and civil rights” to “[communicating] that marriage mattered to gay and lesbian couples for the same reasons that it mattered to straight couples.”

That’s the conclusion that Freedom to Marry and other groups fighting for marriage equality came to after suffering defeat in California’s Proposition 8 referendum. (The quotes above are from the retrospective look at the struggle on the Freedom to Marry website.)

After conducting public opinion polls, focus groups, and other research, these groups formulated a strategy that stressed universal values like love and commitment, appealed to people’s sense of fairness (e.g., the Golden Rule), sought to engage a conflicted but persuadable middle group of voters in conversations intended to answer their questions and open their minds, and used as messengers people from the voters’ own communities, ethnic groups, and political parties.

An early version of that strategy was tested in the Proposition 8 fight in 2008, using an A/B test in two different California areas, and proved successful. More research was done in 2010, a complete strategy created and documented in 2011, and tactics rolled out through the 2012 ballot challenges and beyond. One particularly interesting (and labor-intensive) strategy was to have canvassers engage conflicted voters in in-depth conversations about what marriage meant to them personally.

It’s hard in hindsight to say exactly how much of an effect the changed strategy and tactics had. However there’s no question that 2012 marked a significant turning point in the fight for marriage equality, and after that year the momentum gathered and eventually proved unstoppable. If the new strategy wasn’t the whole story, it was certainly a key part of it.

New struggle, same strategy?

Now that marriage equality has been achieved the fight for LGBTQIA rights has moved to other issues, including in particular enacting non-discrimination laws of various types. From the 1990s on gay rights groups tried to have Congress pass an Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). They had some partial victories, but success eluded them.

Given the current administration and makeup of the House and Senate, it’s unlikely we’ll see anything like ENDA or its successor legislation, the Equality Act, enacted at the Federal level in the near term. Given the Supreme Court decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it’s also unlikely we’ll see Federal court decisions that mandate sweeping non-discrimination provisions. The fight for non-discrimination legislation will thus move to the states, just as it did with marriage equality after the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act.

One of the issues that derailed passage of ENDA in the 2000s was whether or not to include protections for transgender people. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges and majority support for marriage equality has solidified, issues around transgender people, including non-discrimination laws relating to employment and public accomodations, have become the next flashpoint for political conflict.

Here there is good news and bad news. The good news is that inclusion of transgender people in non-discrimination laws has broad-based support across the US, with solid majorities (60% or greater) in all states and supermajorities (70% or greater) in almost all of them—a very different situation than that that faced marriage equality supporters after DOMA. The 45 states with supermajority support represent 95% of the US population.

The bad news is that even supermajority support is not necessarily sufficient to get non-discrimination laws enacted. Researcher Andrew Flores and his colleagues found that public support in a given state had to be at least 81% for there to be even a 50-50 chance of including transgender individuals in non-discrimination policies.

(Why is this? There are various possible reasons, including the fact that transgender people are a very small fraction of the population, and hence have little political power on their own. Their wants and needs in turn receive little political attention, especially in states whose legislatures are dominated by conservative Republicans.)

As of 2015 that level of support was found in only 19 states (representing about 43% of the US population), and only 17 states included transgender people in their non-discrimination policies. (Maryland was in both categories, with an estimated 87% support for transgender inclusion in non-discrimination policies³ and gender identity as a category included in the Fairness for All Marylanders Act of 2014.)

In order to repeat the success of the marriage equality movement, the movement for LGBTQIA rights and transgender inclusion will need to help elect state representatives supportive of inclusive non-discrimination laws, whether they be Democrats or Republicans willing to go against their party’s position (as many Republican legislators did in the marriage equality fight). They’ll also need to persuade the “conflicted middle” of voters when these issues go to referendums, as some no doubt will.

I expect that the strategies and tactics used in these elections will be based on those employed in the fight for marriage equality.

For example, the Movement Advancement Project, one of the groups that worked with Freedom to Marry on marriage equality messaging, urges supporters of non-discrimination policies to emphasize what they refer to as “work values” (hard work, providing for oneself and one’s family, etc.), “American values” (opportunity, freedom, and personal responsibility), and “personal and faith values” (e.g., “treating others like we want to be treated”). The overall message is that everyone, including LGBTQIA people, should “have a fair opportunity to earn a living, be safe, meet their responsibilities, and build a better life.”

Research on other effective tactics has also continued. For example, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla conducted an in-depth study evaluating canvassing techniques, in which they claim that “a single approximately 10-minute conversation encouraging actively taking the perspective of others can markedly reduce [antitransgender] prejudice for at least 3 months.”

In other research, Brian Harrison and Melissa Michelson studied the effect of the choice of messenger on effective messaging around LGBTQIA issues, concluding that people were most persuaded when the person delivering the message had the same or similar in-group identity, and having that message come from that person was somewhat unexpected.

(One of the most prominent examples of this was Barack Obama’s public declaration that he had switched from supporting civil unions to endorsing full marriage equality. Among other things, this may have increased marriage equality support among African Americans enough to ensure victory in the 2012 Maryland referendum.)

Are the theories correct and the corresponding strategies and tactics effective? One critical test will come in a few days, when Massachusetts voters go to the polls to decide whether to keep or repeal a recently-passed gender-identity non-discrimination law. (Opponents of the Fairness for All Marylanders Act of 2014 attempted to force a similar referendum, but failed to get the approximately 56,000 signatures needed to get a measure on the ballot.)

Given that Massachusetts has among the highest levels of estimated support for transgender inclusion in non-discrimination policies (as high as Maryland’s⁴), a loss would be a critical blow to the movement for LGBTQIA rights, fully as devastating as the Proposition 8 loss in California.

At present support for “yes” on Massachusetts Question 3 (retaining the non-discrimination law) is polling above 70%, up from below 60% several months ago. While it looks as if there will be a comfortable margin for victory, it’s worth noting that these figures are significantly lower than the estimates of support referenced above.

Two final thoughts: First, the strategies and tactics I’ve described above—reaching out to voters who are conflicted but persuadable (and ignoring those who are not), leveraging shared values and identities, actively listening to people’s concerns, and so on—would be familar to anyone who’s ever worked in sales and attended a class on effective selling. This is “sales 101,” as they say.

While protests and calling out bigotry are effective in raising public awareness and energizing activists and core supporters, different techniques are needed to get to an electoral majority—even someone who appears to be a bigot upon first impression may end up embarking on a personal journey to become a supporter.

Second, I recognize that from the point of LGBTQIA people themselves, especially transgender people, this is a time when their prospects look dire. Demonizing them for political advantage still works, at least among a key segment of the electorate, and so certain elected officials, political candidates, and interest groups will continue to do it until it stops working.

However I don’t think I’m being pollyannaish in having a measure of qualified optimism about the longer-term prospects for the full inclusion of LGBTQIA people, and transgender people in particular, in American society. I think the LGBTQIA movement has “cracked the code” on how to persuade voters (as the Freedom to Marry website put it), has a core set of activists who gained valuable experience in successfully organizing supporters and winning campaigns, and is dealing with a public that is much more sympathetic to its cause than it was even ten years ago.

But there’s no denying that the next few years are going to be tough, especially for transgender people, and especially in states where there’s a hostile governor and legislature and a level of public support that falls below the very high threshold needed to overcome those obstacles. They have my support.

This marks the conclusion of the promised “Seven Answers” posts. My thanks go out to all of you who’ve read this and other posts in the series. If time and energy permit I’ll post some final thoughts in the next few weeks.

Further exploration

The best source for messaging around marriage equality is the website for the advocacy organization Freedom To Marry. It now serves as an archive of documents outlining the strategy they crafted with other organizations to pursue victory in the minds of voters and in the courts. Key documents include:

• “Messaging, Messengers and Public Support” discusses problems with messaging in early campaigns and how they were corrected.
• “Moving Marriage Forward: Building Majority Support for Marriage” summarizes the messaging strategy created by Freedom to Marry and others.
• “An Ally’s Guide to Talking About Marriage for Same-Sex Couples,” co-authored by Freedom to Marry and the Movement Advancement Project, presents a detailed step by step approach for supporters to use when trying to persuade others.
• “How We Won Marriage: 10 Lessons Learned,” by Marc Solomon of Freedom to Marry, summarizes his advice for other progressive social movements.

Other sources of information and opinion relating to marriage equality include:

• Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America, by Nathaniel Frank, is a good overview of the origins, history, and successful conclusion of the marriage equality movement, including a discussion of conflicts between “liberationists” and “assimiliationists” over goals and strategies.
• “Philanthropy’s Role in The Fight for Marriage Equality,” by Benjamin Sockis, provides a high-level overview of the fight for marriage equality, with a focus on philanthropic support (including a “who’s who” of private foundations and their wealthy donors) and associated strategies and tactics.
• “Against Equality: Marriage” contains links to several articles arguing against LGBTQIA activists focusing on marriage versus other priorities. See in particular “Marriage Will Never Set Us Free” by Dean Spade and Craig Willse, as well as the various articles by Yasmin Nair.

Public support for and messaging strategies relevant to transgender issues are discussed in the following documents:

• “Transgender inclusion in state non-discrimination policies: The democratic deficit and political powerlessness,” by Andrew R. Flores, Jody Herman, and Christy Mallory. A study indicating that overwhelming majority support (over 80%) is necessary for there to be a better than even chance of implementing policies protecting transgender people from discrimination.
• “Talking About Nondiscrimination Protections for LGBT People” and “Talking About Transgender People & Restrooms” from the Movement Advancement Project build on the messaging strategies employed in the “Ally’s Guide” referenced above.
• “No, Wait, Short Conversations Really Can Reduce Prejudice,” an article in The Atlantic by Ed Yong, describes research by David Broockman and Joshua Kallas on the effectiveness of in-person canvassing featuring in-depth conversations. (For more see the paper “Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing.”)
• Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights, by Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson, describes various studies in which the authors sought to test their theory of “Dissonant Identity Priming,” i.e., that people change their minds more when encountering someone in their identity in-group presenting an unexpected position.
• The Ballotpedia article “Massachusetts Question 3, Gender Identity Anti-Discrimination Veto Referendum (2018)” contains summaries and links to information about Massachusetts Question 3, including polls.

Finally, for the calculations and data behind the graphs above, see “Changing Support for Marriage Equality by State” and the source code for that article in the seven-answers code repository.

tl;dr: When it comes to gender equality, I don’t think there are any simple solutions, only tentative ways forward.

After a detour reviewing Howard County campaign signs, I’m back to my series outlining my answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. In this next-to-last post I address Jason’s sixth question:

Considering the UN’s sustainable development goals which refer to gender equality as a “fundamental human right,” how is America performing when it comes to promoting gender equality and what specific steps can and should be taken to secure true gender equality in the United States?

As I did in my post on racial equality, I’ll note up front that questions like this should first and foremost be addressed by people who are most directly affected by the issues under discussion. I’m writing here not because I have any special knowledge of or connection to these issues, but as one voter among many who will be asked to weigh candidates’ positions.

Also, in this post I’m discussing the traditional perspective on gender equality, namely that of women in relation to men. Questions relating to LGBTQIA equality I’ll postpone to the next (and final) post.

This was the hardest post for me to write, because I couldn’t think of one single unifying idea or policy vision around which to organize the discussion. I finally settled on two related topics: the wage gap between men and women, typically thought of as evidence of discrimination and a problem needing correction, and sexual harassment, much in the news recently as a problem impacting the prospects for women’s professional advancement in various fields.

I also consulted only two source documents, both attempting to provide an comprehensive overview of their respective topics, with their own perspectives and potential biases. That means I can’t claim to have a complete picture even of these two topics, so this is at best a starting point for further discussion.

The gender wage gap

When viewed from a high level the story of the gender wage gap is pretty straightforward, as shown in the left graph above: the average woman is paid less than the average man, on both a weekly and annual basis, with women’s income going from roughly two-thirds of men’s income in the 1960s to about four-fifths of their income today. When you see a quote like “women make 78% of what men do” this is the comparison it’s referring to.

However if you look it at this more closely the gap becomes more complicated, and skeptics have the opportunity to raise a host of questions about the causes of the gap, and the extent to which women are actually discriminated against. Labor economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn have written extensively on this topic over the years; the figures above are taken from one of their recent papers. My take after reading their paper is that the raw 22% per cent gap isn’t all due to discrimination, but that the various other factors skeptics have suggested don’t totally explain the existence and persistence of the gap.

The right graph above represents Blau’s and Kuhn’s attempt to explain the gap using the most comprehensive data available to them. They start with the unadjusted gaps as measured in various years from 1980 to the present. Then they attempt to account for “human capital” effects: for example, do men and women receive equal pay if they have the same level of education, the same amount of work experience, and so on. Once this is accounted for the gap narrows by a few percentage points.

Blau and Kuhn then attempt to account for additional factors in their “full specification,” in particular whether men and women receive equal pay if they work in the same industries and occupations. After accounting for these the gap is reduced further, but still exists–and in fact has remained relatively the same for the past 10-20 years.

The datasets they’re using aren’t detailed enough to look into all posible explanations of the gender wage gap, but they cite other research to try to get a feel for how salient those explanations might be. In particular they look at explanations based on gender differences in psychological factors (for example, that women prefer “working with people” to “working with things”) and conclude that “this source of the gender gap, based at least on what we know at this point, while worth pursuing, does not appear to provide a silver bullet in our understanding of gender differences in labor-market outcomes.”

Some other interesting take-aways from this paper:

• It’s possible that one major factor in reducing the gender wage gap was the decline of unions in the manufacturing sector. In other words, things didn’t get better from a gender equality perspective because women got paid more, but because (many) men got paid less.
• “Women [now] exceed men in educational attainment and have greatly reduced the gender experience gap.” In other words, traditional “human capital” explanations for the gender wage gap are now less relevant.
• In recent years the gender wage gap has been “larger for the highly skilled than for others, suggesting that developments in the labor market for executives and highly skilled workers especially favored men.” Although the authors do not draw this conclusion, it’s possible that this persistence of the gender wage gap for more skilled workers helps explain why the issue continues to be so politically relevant: it affects exactly those women who are most likely to be politically active.
• Finally, the authors point out that “recent research suggests an especially important role for work force interruptions and shorter hours in explaining gender wage gaps in high-skilled occupations than for the workforce as a whole.” Depending on one’s perspective we could see this as another example of the power of societal expectations (women being expected to downplay work in favor of family responsibilities) or as an aspect of personal preferences—or perhaps both factors operating simultaneously.

Sexual harassment

Why might women be less represented in certain professions, might be less able to reach the highest (and best-paying) levels of a profession, or might leave a profession earlier than they otherwise might (thus limiting their lifetime earnings)? One possibility is that certain industries, professions, and organizations make women unwelcome, so that they are less likely to enter them and more likely to leave them.

Sexual harassment in particular industries, professions, and organizations is one thing that might be relevant to this. Certainly recent years have seen a number of high-profile cases of harassment and abuse, highlighted by the #MeToo movement. However that doesn’t directly address how prevalent sexual harassment might be in general.

One source of data on this question is a large survey (over 28,000 students) carried out by the University of Texas System. This survey was in turn one of the major inputs to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on sexual harassment in STEM fields, along with a similar survey at Penn State. Since these surveys were done at universities their findings aren’t directly applicable to workplaces in general. However they are at least suggestive of what post-university workplaces might be like, especially when looking at the experiences of graduate students (who can be considered entry-level academic employees).

The University of Texas survey found a relatively low incidence of the most severe forms of sexual harassment of student women by faculty or staff: about 1% of student women across all academic disciplines had experienced sexual coercion (“when favorable professional or educational treatment is conditioned on sexual activity”) and about 2-4% across those same disciplines experienced unwanted sexual attention (“verbal or physical unwelcome sexual advances, which can include assault”).

These figures for harassment of students by faculty or staff were about the same for student men, indicating that sexual harassment in its most severe forms is not necessarily something suffered only by women. However, there was a significant difference in the rate at which student women suffered gender harassment, defined as “verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey hostility, objectication, exclusion, or second-class status about members of one gender.” About a quarter to a half of student women across academic disciplines had experienced these sorts of misogynistic attitudes from faculy or staff, a rate about a third to more than twice as high (depending on discipline) as that for student men experiencing misandristic attitudes.

As alluded to above, student women in some academic disciplines experienced gender harassment at significantly higher rates than in other disciplines: almost half of all student women in medicine experienced this, and about a quarter in engineering. High rates of gender harassment of medical students were experienced by men as well (about a fifth of student men).

The figures from the Penn State survey are not directly comparable, since they’re not broken out by discipline. However in general they echo the findings of the UT survey: a relatively low rate of the most severe forms of sexual harassment, with women and men experiencing this type of harassment at roughly comparable rates, and a relectively high rate of gender harassment, with women experiencing this at a rate significantly higher than men.

So what should we make of all this? I have several thoughts:

First, although this isn’t directly demonstrated by the data in this case, my bet is that sexual harassment in its most severe forms is an outgrowth of a more general atmosphere of gender harassment: just as (for example) lax attitudes towards corruption create an environment in which people predisposed to financial wrongdoing are emboldened to pursue it on a massive scale, I suspect an environment of pervasive gender harassment provides cover for a relatively few people to engage in severe sexual harassment.

Second, although again this isn’t directly demonstrated by this data, sexual harassment (in all its forms) that particularly affects employment prospects seems to be a function of power differentials within the industry, profession, and organization. Thus, for example, the medicical field has long put doctors on a pedestal, and tolerated a sort of professional hazing in the treatment of residents. It’s therefore not surprising that gender harassment of medical students should be particularly widespread.

In general powerful people can get away with harassment and abuse of all kinds: they are seen as indispensable and/or untouchable, and they have equally powerful friends and associates willing to cover for them and protect them from any consequences for their behavior. Sexual harassment is no exception. This scenario plays out in fields from politics and business to science and the humanities, as witnessed by the recent coverage of high-profile sexual harassers in each of these fields.

So, what if anything can be done about this, above and beyond more strictly enforcing legal sanctions already in place? Gender harassment in an industry, profession, and organization is an example of general incivility in professional contexts, and I think can be at least partly addressed in the same way, namely by social promotion and enforcement of norms of professional civility.

The #MeToo movement is in a way an example of this. So too are the first three recommendations of the NAS study on sexual harassment: “Create diverse, inclusive, and respectful environments“, “Address the most common form of sexual harassment: gender harassment,” and “Move beyond legal compliance to address culture and climate.”

However professional norms are greatly influenced by those at the top, who can model good behavior or exhibit bad behavior. Thus in addition to grass roots promotion and enforcement of desired norms, it’s also important to ensure that powerful people can be held to account, and known abusers prevented from exploiting their power base. The #MeToo movement is part of this also, but there are also other potential ways to address this.

For example, one common pattern seen in the sciences is for a “superstar” laboratory head (Principal Investigator, to use the correct term) to engage in multiple incidents of sexual harassment and abuse over the years without any consequences. Among other things, their ability to bring in a continued stream of government grants and other funding makes them valuable to their host universities, and thus causes those universities to dismiss or downplay reports of abuse of students–students who themselves are dependent on the abuser to provide them recommendations for future positions.

Even if universities themselves prove to be uncooperative in disciplining their faculty (which is likely to be the case as long as they value the money and fame superstar faculty members bring), governments can exercise their power over grants. Beyond just denying grants to known abusers (which will be ineffective if abusers are not reported), they can help moderate the “superstar” system by spreading grants to more institutions and making grants less dependent on institutional and researcher reputation, for example by using lotteries or apportioning more grants to young researchers.

(The NAS report on sexual harassment made one recommendation along these lines–“Diffuse the hierarchical and dependent relationship between trainees and faculty,” for example by channeling funding through academic departments rather than through individual researchers–but does not address the overall system of government grantmaking.)

Whether there are similar mechanisms that could work in other fields is an open question. (For example, it’s not clear what could reduce the power of abusive gatekeepers in film or TV.) However I can’t conclude this post without making one final point:

The media have focused on high-profile cases of sexual harassment, including those involving prominent celebrities, and the discussion of obstacles to women’s professional advancement has focused on high-skill professions. However, the brunt of gender harassment and more severe forms of sexual harassment is likely borne by those closer to the bottom of the income pyramid, women stuck in relatively low-paying jobs that they feel unable to leave for various reasons.

I’ve written previously about social insurance proposals to provide universal health care, a basic income, and other means by which people can have increased opportunity and less chance of falling through the cracks of a dynamic capitalist economy. To the extent such measures increase labor mobility and lead women to take more chances in their work lives, I think they may also help address the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace, and perhaps the gender wage gap as well. Rather than being able to exploit a captive and compliant workforce, firms that foster a culture of incivility and harassment may find themselves facing the market discipline of women workers who feel more free to say “no.”

Further exploration

As noted above, for this post I read deeply rather than widely, focusing on two lengthy works that themselves cover a great deal of relevant topics and research.

• Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. 2017. “The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations.” Journal of Economic Literature, 55 (3): 789-865. DOI: 10.1257/jel.20160995. Reviews research on various explanations for the gender wage gap in the US. (Blau and Kahn have a long history of publications on this topic; this is the most recent one.) See section 7, “Conclusion,” on pages 852-855 for an overall summary.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24994. A 312-page report that explores the research on sexual harassment of women in various STEM fields and makes various recommendations for institutional and policy changes. For a condensed version of its findings and recommendations see the 12-page summary.

Other works of interest include the following:

• Cultivating Learning and Safe Environments (CLASE) study. A survey undertaken by the University of Texas System, covering over 28 thousand students at 13 academic institutions within the UT System.
• Sexual Misconduct Climate Survey. A survey undertaken by the Pennsylvania State University system, covering about 11 thousand students. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a single summary report for all campuses, but University Park is the largest campus and its report is presumably representative.
• “Here’s How Geoff Marcy’s Sexual Harassment Went On For Decades,” by Azeen Ghorayshi. A Buzzfeed article discussing how a “superstar” university researcher managed for many years to evade consequences for his sexual harassment of students.

tl;dr: I reveal the winner of the vote for best-looking Howard Couny 2018 campaign sign.

. . . and it’s the sign for Shahan Rizvi, candidate for Democratic Central Committee. His sign got 37% of the total vote. Congratulations Shahan on your victory!

The next two highest vote-getters were the signs for Byron Macfarlane (28% of the total vote) and Sabina Taj (15%). Condolences to Byron and Sabina: your signs looked good, but I think Shahan’s highly-effective get-out-the-vote efforts made all the difference.

Thanks to all of you who participated in the voting not just in the final round but in earlier rounds as well. I hope you enjoyed these posts!

Now I’ll be back to posting on other matters. If you want to keep up with my future posts (which I doubt will be nearly this interesting) you can follow me as @hecker on Twitter. I’ll also post any Howard County-relevant stuff in the Howard County Facebook group.

tl;dr: After you vote in today’s 2018 Maryland primary, vote for the best-looking Howard County 2018 campaign signs among those that made it to the final round.

Polls are now closed for voting for the signs discussed in parts 1 through 6 of this series. The following candidates’ signs were the winners and runners-up for each part (with their percentage of the vote in parentheses):

• Part 1. Winner: Kim Oldham (56%). Runner-up: Greg Jennings (15%).
• Part 2. Winners: Deb Jung and Shahan Rizvi (tie) (32%).
• Part 3. Winner: Danny Mackey (35%). Runner-up: Christiana Rigby (29%).
• Part 4. Winner: Sabina Taj (77%). Runner-up: Rich Gibson (9%).
• Part 5. Winner: Liz Walsh (54%). Runner-up: Jessica Feldmark (32%).
• Part 6. Winner: Byron Macfarlane (52%). Runner-up: Opel Jones (24%).

The following candidates’ signs will advance to the final round of eight (in random order): Deb Jung, Liz Walsh, Byron Macfarlane, Jessica Feldmark, Shahan Rizvi, Sabina Taj, Kim Oldham, and Danny Mackey.

The signs for Deb Jung and Shahan Rizvi both advanced because they finished in a dead heat, with the exact same number of votes. I also included Jessica Feldmark’s sign as my wild card choice, since it was the runner-up with the highest percentage of the vote share (the same as Jung’s and Rizvi’s signs, as it happens).

Please vote for your choice of the best-looking sign of those listed above. Extended voting hours will run until 11 pm on Election Day, so you can vote for your favorite sign while you attend the parties after the real polls close. Check Twitter and Facebook tomorrow to see which sign won!

tl;dr: Here’s my final set of reviews of Howard County 2018 campaign signs. This post features signs from Opel Jones, Steven Bolen, Bill McMahon, China Williams, Wayne Robey, Byron Macfarlane, Gail Bates, Katie Fry Hester, and Robert Miller.

Today I have only nine signs to review. Every post thus far has included only signs that I saw at the Miller Branch library during early voting. This post includes one other sign, for Wayne Robey, that I saw in my own neighborhood.

There are a number of other candidates who did not have signs at the Miller Branch library or other places I’ve looked. Typically these are candidates who are not actively campaigning or have no opposition in the primary and will post signs later. I don’t plan on doing an update of this series for the general election, so signs for this latter group of candidates will go unreviewed this year.

As always, the signs are listed in random order, there’s a survey link at the end, and you can find more background at part 1.

This is a good simple sign that has multiple strategies to avoid being boring. First, the star in the middle of the letter “o“ in “Jones” lends visual interest to the text and breaks up the all caps single typeface nature of it. Second, the use of a second color highlights “Opel” just as the star did for “Jones”. Finally, the yellow strip at the bottom echoes the color of “Opel” and underlines the sign as a whole.

Of all the signs I’ve seen that try to use a map of Maryland as a design element, this is the only one where I think it works. Maryland has a strange asymmetrical shape, so it’s difficult to fit into a design. The secret here is to use the northern and eastern boundaries of Maryland to complete the rectangle of which “Steven” and “Bolen” form the left and bottom sides.

The other parts of the sign work well too: the brownish orange and blue match well, the text looks clean and readable, and it’s a nice touch to have the color of “District 9A” match the color of the Maryland map.

The only things I’m not 100% on board with are the wavy lines that evoke the shape of a fluttering flag. They’re OK as a way to fill the space above and below the main sign content, and I really can’t imagine a good alternative, but for some reason they didn’t totally win me over.

As I mentioned in my last post, for some reason candidates for Howard County Sheriff are fond of the black on yellow color scheme: Jim Fitzgerald used this color scheme in 2014, and Marcus Harris is also using it this year.

This is a reasonably good example of the type: readable, with good emphasis on the name “McMahon,” and a sheriff’s-badge design element that doesn’t over-complicate the design. It has a slogan, but it’s nice and crisp.

A good minimal high-contrast sign that provides the key information needed by voters. It’s worth noting that “China” is almost twice as large as “Williams”. This is partly dictated by the last name being significantly longer, and thus less tall when both names occupy the width of the sign. However it also makes sense from a name recognition perspective, since “China” is more memorable than “Williams.”

This is a good example of using red, white, and blue together: the red ribbon and blue star design elements together give a bright and even playful air to the sign that makes it more attractive.

The black text also provides good contrast with the white background. However I’m not really sure why such a blocky and angular typeface was chosen for “Robey”. It looks a bit strange, especially since the red and blue design elements are curved.

Byron Macfarlane has a record of good-looking signs, and this one is in that tradition: legible and minimal text, clean and bold typography, attractive colors that go well together, and a jaunty design element in the upper left. Note that it follows the same strategy as several other signs of contrasting alternating lines of white and colored text throughout the sign.

Also note that “Byron” is set in a slight larger size than “Macfarlane,” even though it really doesn’t need to be (since “Byron” isn’t intended to take up the full width of the sign. However making “Byron” larger provides better visual balance against both “Macfarlane” and the design element in the upper left. It also has the side effect of implying the candidate is a familar presence and on a first-name basis with his constituents after two terms in office.

This sign is almost but not quite identical to the sign that Gail Bates used in 2014. The only change I can discern is that the new sign omits the word “For” in “For State Senate”—probably because this year Bates is an incumbent.

Because I’m getting tired I’ll just quote my comments from 2014:

This is a good sign, especially for using only two colors. The “BATES” is large and readable in a clear serif typeface, and the smaller “Gail” in a script typeface adds a nice informal, almost personal, note. The integration of the Maryland flag-inspired banner is also done very well; note that the banner is outlined to prevent confusion between the sign background and the white parts of the banner.

(The outline I was referring to is the one on top of the banner where it meets the border of the sign.)

This particular example of the sign is marred (in my opinion) by the endorsement logos, but the sign underneath is pretty good. I like the colors, with the light purple of “Katie Fry” contrasting well with the dark purple background and the white text of “Hester”. Setting “Katie Fry” right above “Hester” with almost no linespacing also provides a little visual interest where the descender of the “y” intrudes just a bit on the “T.”

Unlike the China Williams sign above with “China” featured prominently, this sign puts much more emphasis on the last name “Hester”. Here the situation is reversed: “Hester” is a more unusual name than “Katie,” and so it makes sense to make it the focus of the sign and to relegate “Katie Fry” to a secondary role.

I’m not sure if the greenish-gray background color on this sign was intended to evoke a blackboard or not. In any case, while I’m not a big fan of that particular color it does provide a good contrast with the white text. The text itself is clear and readable.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m not a fan of putting endorsement logos on signs. The color of the two “Teacher Recommended” logos here clashes somewhat with the background color, and the logos look a bit strange perched on the “shoulders” of “Miller.”

However the design element I’m more concerned about is the steering wheel at the middle of the bottom white stripe. Someone down my street has this sign in their yard, and I must have passed it dozens of times. I also saw it at even closer range when I went to vote. However it was not until I actually looked closely at the sign when reviewing it that I finally figured out that the thing at the bottom was a steering wheel, and I was able to connect it with the “Learning driven” slogan.

In the interest of a simpler design and not confusing people looking at the sign, I think it might have been better to leave the steering wheel off and just include the slogan. Alternately the design could be revamped entirely to make the steering wheel bigger and make it a more integral part of the design.

And with that I conclude my reviews, after discussing 58 signs in all. Please vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

A special bonus: tomorrow (Primary Tuesday) please check Twitter and Facebook for your opportunity to vote for the best of the best. I will create one final survey with the winners of each day’s vote and (if appropriate) a “wild card” entry I feel deserves inclusion, and will do a final post on Wednesday with the top three vote-getters.

tl;dr: I’m in the home stretch now in the race to review Howard County 2018 campaign signs. This post features signs from Hiruy Hadgu, Natalie Ziegler, Jessica Feldmark, John Francis McMahon, Clarence Lam, James Howard, Liz Walsh, Ian Moller-Knudsen, Marcus Harris, and Jeremy Eldridge.

You should know the drill by now: ten signs, ten reviews, order is random, survey link at the end, more background at part 1.

The color is an unusual choice relative to other political signs, but I think it works well and gives a good contrast with the white lettering. You also certainly can’t fault the prominence and legibility of the candidate’s name—helped here by the fact that both first and last names have only five characters each.

The first name actually looks slightly larger than the last name. This appears to be due to the first name having an “i” rather than an “a”. Since all the other characters in each name are the same or of similar width, setting both names to the same overall width forces the last name to be slightly smaller to fit, since the letter “i” is narrower than the letter “a.”

The only thing I would question on this sign is the treatment of the “for” in “Democrat for County Council,” which is just set in a lighter version of the same typeface used for the rest of the line. It might have been better to set it in lower case and italics, a strategy used on other signs.

Candidates love endorsements, but fans of candidates’ signs like me hate them because they often result in endorsement logos being slapped on signs and obscuring the design. That’s the case here, with the Sierra Club green in particular clashing greatly with the red and blue color scheme.

Although it’s interesting: if the endorsement logos weren’t there it looks like there’d be a lot of space between “Delegate for 9A” and “Natalie”. It’s almost as if the sign were designed to leave sufficient space for the logos.

Otherwise the sign looks fine. Note the inclusion of a thin white strip between to the red and blue parts of the sign to avoid directly juxtaposing those two colors and give the sign more of a “red, white, and blue” feel.

This sign takes a different approach, boldly interrupting a blue background with a diagonal slash of bright red. It also uses drop shadows on the text for “Jessica Feldmark,” a unique choice among 2018 signs, making the text seem to float above the blue and red background.

The overall result is a sign that looks good and stands out from the crowd.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this sign. The green background is common among Democratic candidates here and elsewhere, and the main typeface is legible and looks professional. The only design element is the badge icon within the letter “o”. Candidates for sheriff (almost?) always include some form of badge in their signs; this one is well-integrated into the overall design.

This sign is very reminiscent of Clarence Lam’s 2014 sign: bold yellow text in the same sans serif typeface, a dark background to provide high contrast, and a small horizontally-centered banner-like design element to add some visual interest but not detract from the candidate’s name.

It’s worth noting that the 2014 signs for Eric Ebersole and Terri Hill were somewhat quirky and visually busy. Now that they’re on a slate with Clarence Lam they’ve adopted his philosophy of stripped-down “get it done” minimalism when it comes to signs. As with Lam’s 2014 sign, I don’t think this philosophy produces signs that are particularly attractive or interesting from a design perspective, but they are undeniably effective when it comes to the basic job of promoting the candidates’ names.

This sign is in many ways the opposite of the Lam/Ebersole/Hill sign, and shows that there is such a thing as being too subtle from a design perspective. First, why is the candidate’s name so relatively small? There’s a lot of unused area on this sign that could have been devoted to text.

Second, what is the image on the bottom of the sign supposed to be? At first glance I thought it was an American flag. At second glance I thought it was a Maryland flag. Now I’m doubting even that.

If you’ve read this series thus far you’ll know that I like to see design sophistication and even elegance in signs. But I also think that to be effective as signs they need to be more “in your face” than this one is.

I chose the order of these signs randomly (or rather, my computer did it for me), but it’s almost as if the order were designed to help me make certain points. Here’s a good example of a sign that employs sophisticated design in the service of highlighting the candidate.

There are at least four separate design “tricks” in the sign. The first and most prominent is the use of a light blue background with dark blue diagonal stripes (or a dark blue background with light blue stripes, depending on how you look at it). This is very attention-grabbing, almost looking like a glossy metallic surface over which the white text floats.

The second is the rounded corners on the background, reminiscent of an old-style TV set. By leaving the actual corners of the sign blank, this focuses attention on the middle of the sign where the candidate’s name is located.

The third is having the vertical stems of the letters “L” and “H” flow into the white border. (This was made possible in the first place because of the particular forms of those letters, and because “Liz Walsh” is a short enough name to fit on one line.) This impairs readability of the name just a tad, but produces a striking effect.

Fourth (and most subtle) is the thin black (?) outline on the white letters of the text. This helps to separate the letters from the light blue/dark blue background and make them “pop.”

Finally, the sign shows a good strategy for handling endorsement logos and other ancillary sign elements: don’t put them on the sign itself, but attach them to a corner where they’re prominent but don’t obscure the main part of the sign.

We’re now back to relatively plain signs. The sign designer here faced the problem that “Moller-Knudsen” is a long name that’s hard to fit on a sign without making the text relatively small. Some signs address that problem by breaking the name at the hyphen and splitting it across two lines—see for example the 2014 sign for Renée McGuirk-Spence.

I think a similar strategy could have been followed for this sign, especially since “Moller” and “Knudsen” are almost the same length. The extra line required could have been compensated for by removing the “Elect” text in the upper left corner. As it is that text sits all by itself and occupies space and visual attention that could instead go to the candidate’s name and office sought.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that candidates for Howard County Sheriff should use signs that consist of black text on a yellow background with a sheriff’s badge. Jim Fitzgerald had signs like this both in 2010 and 2014. (John Newnan had one in 2014 that reversed the scheme and used yellow on black.)

In this cycle the tradition is continued by Marcus Harris and (as we’ll see in the next post) Bill McMahon, while John Francis McMahon goes his own way (as seen above). Harris’s sign has the key elements, with the name displayed prominently and legibly in a conventional san serif typeface. The yellow is bright and not muddy, and the sign also has a white border, which I think always helps the main part of the sign stand out more. (At least one of Jim Fitzgerald’s signs didn’t have such a border, and I think suffered for it.)

The last sign for today is another sign for a Central Committee Candidate. I think the design for this sign flows from the candidate’s name being relatively long at eight characters and the choice to use all caps for the text. That means that the area for the name on the sign has to be relatively small (unless the letters were stretched vertically) and the designer has to fill the rest of the sign with other elements.

In this case the chosen strategy was to divide the sign horizontally into three areas of equal height, with the office sought and authority line in the bottom section and “Vote for” in the top section. It’s a reasonable approach, with my only nit being that the sign looks a little bottom-heavy because of the large amount of text in that section relative to the middle and (especially) top sections.

Otherwise the sign looks fine: the colors are attractive and the typography looks clean and readable.

49 signs reviewed thus far, and 9 to go; the next post should cover all the rest of them. Check Twitter and Facebook for the next article, and don’t forget to vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: I’m continuing my reviews of 2018 campaign signs in Howard County. This post features signs from Mary Kay Sigaty, Shawn Conley, Sabina Taj, Anne Dodd, Elizabeth Ann Fitch, Saif Rehman, Rich Gibson, Allan Kittleman, David Yungmann, and Chao Wu.

As in the last post I review ten different signs, again in random order. For more on this series see part 1.

This sign is put together reasonably well, but it seems a bit busy to me. That’s likely because the Maryland flag (attractive though it may be) is a bit busy visually, and this sign devotes a fair amount of background space to it.

Otherwise the sign is fine. The typography is varied, with the typeface used for “Mary Kay” providing a note of informality. The sign also follows the rules for the four colors of the Maryland flag: match yellow with black (as in the “Mary Kay” and ”Democrat for State Senate” text) and match red with white (as in the “District 12” text), but never juxtapose red with yellow if you can help it.

This is sort of a middle-of-the-road sign: it’s legible, prominently features the key information, and has a little bit of a design element in the white stripe joining up with the descender of the “y,” but otherwise there’s not a lot that makes it stand out from the pack.

The one exception is the inclusion of a small photo of the candidate. This must have been intended for people encountering the sign close up, like at a voting location, because this would be almost impossible to make out if you were just driving by.

The thing that really jumps out at you about this sign is the horizontal slightly wavy stripe that forms the crossbar of the capital “A”. There’s actually a fair bit of subtlety to this element: if you look really closely you can see that there’s a thin black stripe separating the upper blue part of the stripe from the lower red part. I’m not sure exactly why it was included; possibly it’s to avoid directly juxtaposing red and blue, two colors that cause visual issues when seen side-by-side.

The horizontal stripe is echoed by the smaller stripe separating “Howard County” from “Board of Education”. This smaller stripe is also composed of three smaller stripes, red and blue with black between them.

Like Clarence Lam, Sabina Taj is blessed with a three-letter last name that can be displayed at an extremely large size. Her first name isn’t that long either, so it can be shown at a large size as well. In combination with the stripe design element and the high contrast between the dark blue text and the white background the result is a sign that does a very good job of highlighting the candidate’s name.

Like other Judge of the Orphans’ Court incumbents, Anne Dodd is reusing the design from her 2014 sign. Here’s what I wrote about it in the last cycle:

This is a good example of a effective minimal sign design: Only as much text as needed, a single and simple sans serif typeface (the “for” appears to be simply in an oblique version of the main typeface), no extraneous design elements, and only a single color other than white. I have only one criticism: When viewed from a distance the “D” and “O” in “DODD” look somewhat similar, so that the name looks like “OOOO” or “DDDD”. A different typeface might have helped this, or alternatively using both upper and lower case (“Dodd” vs. “DODD”).

The only change this time was to add the word “Re-elect” in the upper left corner, similar to what Nicole Bormel Miller did with her sign. This somewhat mars the pure minimalism of the original sign, but overall the sign still looks good.

Another Orphans’ Court sign, this one is an interesting case: the color is great, the typeface is elegant and “Fitch” stands out nicely, but to me the white rectangle around “Orphans’ Court” makes the sign look slightly bottom-heavy.

I presume the designer tried just using white text on the same blue background for “Orphans’ Court” and preferred the approach they ultimately took, possibly to make the name of the office stand out a bit more. I’m just a rank amateur, so I’m not going to second-guess their decision.

I will confess to a bias here: I generally don’t like signs that are just black (or in this case, what appears to be almost dark blue) text on an overall yellow background. I just don’t think it’s an attractive color combination, especially when those are the only two colors on the sign. I’ll try to put away that bias a bit for the moment, but even taking a more neutral attitude this sign doesn’t really stand out too much.

One thing I wonder about is whether the designer contemplated putting the candidate’s first name in the upper left. There’s plenty of room for it, and it would have balanced out the “Ph.D.” mortarboard in the upper right. As it is the empty space causes the sign to look a bit bottom heavy.

For some reason people running for State’s Attorney have a track record of producing excellent campaign signs: I thought Dario Broccolino’s 2014 sign was the overall best of that election cycle, and Kim Oldham’s sign in this cycle stands out as well.

Rich Gibson’s 2014 sign was no slouch either, but his new sign is even better in all respects: the 2014 black and orange colors have been upgraded to a deep blue and a brighter orange. All text is now in the same sans serif typeface, with some text in orange for visual contrast. (Note that it’s less important text: the candidate’s last name and office sought are still in white for maximum impact.)

The Howard County map design element has been replaced with two more effective elements, an orange checkmark that lends visual interest to “Gibson” and an element in the lower right corner that evokes the Maryland flag. (In case you’re interested, the official name for that part of the flag is a “cross bottony.”)

All in all this is a very good-looking sign that also checks all the boxes for what you want to see in a campaign sign.

As far as I can tell this is almost but not quite the same sign Allan Kittleman used in his 2014 race for Howard County Executive. The main change appears to be a change in aspect ratio: relative to the 2014 sign that I reviewed the current sign is wider, so that the letters appear to be less narrow than on the previous sign. (This doesn’t apply to the red banner though, which appears to have kept its previous width and now takes up a bit less of the total width of the sign.)

The old sign also had the website name in the lower right. It was removed from the new sign—probably a good idea, since it was small, hard to read, and detracted from the overall design.

Since the 2014 sign was a pretty good sign and Kittleman won that race, I presume he decided to stick with a winning formula. I’ll do the same, and just quote part of what I wrote last time:

I’ve previously written about the problems inherent in using all four colors of the Maryland flag in a single sign. This sign handles those problems as well as they can be handled, mainly by avoiding the red text on yellow background found in signs from Trent Kittleman, Frank Mirabile, and others. Instead this sign carefully restricts itself to the exact color juxtapositions found the Maryland flag: black with yellow, and red with white. More specifically, it restricts itself to what I think are the best color combinations: black text on a yellow background and white text on a red background.

Some other things to note about this sign: The typeface is clean and readable; it’s bold enough to stand out but light enough to allow adequate space between the letters. Using both upper and lower case in “Kittleman” means that the text isn’t quite as wide as it would be if it were in all upper case, and thus it can fit better on the sign. . . .

The red banner-like design element in the upper right corner is well-done; note that on the left side of the element the yellow background seems to form an arrowhead pointing to the “Proven Independent Leader” slogan. The slogan itself points diagonally upward to the right to make the sign more dynamic (the same technique used on the Dario Broccolino sign). Finally, note that the horizontal line separating “Kittleman” from “Howard County Executive” is not just red on yellow (a poor combination) but is both red and white in order to maintain the preferred color juxtapositions I mentioned above.

The one thing that bothered me about this sign is that the “Howard County Executive” seems a bit thin. When I was walking around the neighborhood I had some trouble making that text out when viewing the sign from a distance.

The increased width of the 2018 sign doesn’t help readability of the “Howard County Executive” text, since it’s now stretched out a bit further.

The color scheme on this sign is very reminiscent of the colors on Warren Miller’s 2014 sign: a very dark blue/black combined with a red that’s bright but not garish. I thought that was a very effective combination on Miller’s sign, and it looks good here too. The major difference is that this sign has blue/black on the top and red on the bottom, reversing the colors from Miller’s sign. For the record, I prefer red on top; I think having red on the bottom makes the sign look a bit top-heavy.

The most significant issue with this sign is not the fault of the designer. Rather it’s that “Yungmann” is a relatively long name, and to fit it within the vertical area allotted to it requires making the letters relatively tall and narrow. This is turn makes the name look horizontally squished and impairs readability somewhat.

In the last cycle Clarence Lam had the shortest last name of any candidate, and Lam’s 2014 sign took full advantage of that fact to make the candidate’s last name as prominent as possible. In this cycle Chao Wu goes Lam one better with a two-letter family name.

However, rather than having “Wu” totally take over the design, his sign exploits the fact that Wu’s given name is also short, so that the entire name can fit comfortably in one line and still be large enough to have good readability and high impact. It also use mixed upper and lower case for the name, which I think was a good decision: besides improving readability somewhat, it also helps ensure that voters don’t misinterpret “Chao Wu” as a single undifferentiated family name “CHAOWU.”

As far as other aspects, though Chao Wu is running for a nonpartisan position and I have no idea of his party affiliation he’s an independent, the sign color scheme looks very similar to is reminiscent of that used by Republicans David Yungmann and Warren Miller, with a deep blue/black and bright red. The major difference is that the blue/black is used for the text, not the background. I wonder what the sign would have looked like with the slogan in white text on a blue/black background (which would have matched Warren Miller’s sign); I suspect it would not have worked as well but have not tried this out in an image editor.

All in all this is a good sign, readable for the important bits (name and position sought) and with straightforward attractive colors and typeface. My only concern is with the slogan: I think it’s OK to have a slogan because the sign has only three lines, but it seems just a tad cluttered compared to the rest of the sign.

39 signs reviewed thus far, at least 18 to go—perhaps more if I can find signs for a few candidates who didn’t have signs at the Miller Branch early voting location. Check Twitter and Facebook for the next article, and don’t forget to vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: I’m now at the halfway point in my reviews of 2018 campaign signs in Howard County. This post features signs from Christiana Rigby, Carleen Pena, Calvin Ball, Nicole Bormel Miller, Danny Mackey, Harry Dunbar, Guy Guzzone and fellow Team 13 members Vanessa Atterbeary, Shane Pendergrass, and Jen Terrasa, Courtney Watson, Steve Hunt, and Anita Pandey.

As in the last post I review ten different signs, again in random order. For more on this series see part 1.

This sign has a couple of interesting aspects. First, it features the candidate’s first name more prominently than her last name: the type size is the same and her first name is in a bolder version of the same typeface used for her last name. Is Rigby trying to build name recognition for herself based primarily on her first name (like “Krish for Maryland”), or is it just a fluke of the design?

Either way, that causes a problem for the design, since now “Rigby” looks relatively unbalanced on the left side. The large “Teacher Recommended” helps rebalance the design, but it also (at least to me) makes the sign look more like a Board of Education sign than a County Council sign—especially since “Democrat for County Council” is on a lighter background that provides less contrast for the text and impairs readability a bit.

Don’t get me wrong: I think this is overall an attractive and professional sign. I just wonder about the decisions that went into this particular design.

Every election cycle sees its share of what I’ll call “utilitarian” signs. These are basic signs with a white background and one other color, typically divided into three sections with the text and background colors reversed on the middle section, with the same plain sans serif typeface used on all three sections.

For a past example of this type of sign in its purest form see Kay Hartleb’s plain 2010 sign. This one varies the formula a bit by having four lines of text, so the middle section includes both “Carleen” and “Pena.”

Critiquing the design of a sign like this is somewhat beside the point. It does the job of putting the candidate’s name out there, and that’s about it. (Although I will say that I think the typeface on the top and bottom lines of text seems a bit thin for best readability, and putting “Carleen” on the left rather than centered makes the sign unbalanced.)

A good solid sign, professional looking but not flashy. The color scheme is good and somewhat reminiscent of that on Byron Macfarlane’s sign (to be reviewed in a future post), but it doesn’t “pop” quite as much. There’s also a nice contrast in the typography: lower case serif for the first name, upper case serif for the last name, then upper case san serif for the office.

Note the subtle green design elements on either side of “Calvin”: they’re a nice touch, helping the name visually balance against the larger last name, and echoing the green rectangle around “Howard County Executive.”

Like fellow Judge of the Orphans’ Court candidates Leslie Smith Turner and (as we’ll see) Anne Dodd, Nicole Bormel Miller is reusing the basic design from her 2014 sign. Here’s what I wrote about it in the last cycle:

This sign has a nice purple background color (a break from the usual yellow or red), a good balance between the white foreground and purple background, and an interesting serif typeface. As with the [Shari] Chase sign, I take points away for not spelling “Orphans’” properly.

The major change for this year’s sign is the addition of the “Re-elect” text in the upper left corner, since (unlike 2014) she’s running as an incumbent. That in turn forces the “Nicole Bormel” text to be smaller and further to the right. It’s still an attractive sign, but it now looks just a tad unbalanced.

I should add that Miller’s last name is quite common—in fact, it’s shared by two other candidates in this cycle, Warren Miller and Robert Miller—and she apparently always uses her middle name. Thus she has a lot of text to fit on a sign. I think using lower case on the top and bottom lines of text, with only “Miller” in upper case, helps lighten the look of the sign and make it look less dense.

Finally, not to be pedantic, there’s still no apostrophe on “Orphans’.”

This is a good sign. I was originally going to write that I wasn’t a fan of the background color, but in looking at the sign again I think it’s quite handsome—and because there’s no yellow in the sign it doesn’t remind me of the Washington Redskins. (This has nothing to do with my attitude toward the football team, I just don’t like their team colors, especially when the burgundy tilts to the bright side.)

The “Mackey” is quite visible and impactful, and the text size and condensed typeface on “Danny” matches it well. In fact, all the text on this sign looks good and has variety, despite all of it being in upper case and using variants of the same sans serif typeface.

A further nice subtle touch is shown on the stars to the right of “Danny”. The stars (or some other design element) are needed to balance out the left-justified “Danny,” but if the stars were solid white then they would pull focus from the candidate’s name. (I tried this out in an image editor to gauge the effect.) Instead the stars look like they were hand-drawn in scribbles, which both lets some of the background through, lightening the look of the stars, and also provides some informality in an otherwise fairly formal sign. (Folks, this is why you hire graphic design professionals.)

This sign does a good job of putting the candidate’s name front and center, as well as highlighting the office being sought. The colors are good as well, especially the red. Normally I don’t like to see red design elements directly on a blue background, because the contrast can be problematic. (We’ll see some other signs where this is true.) In this case though the brightness of the red and the white text within the red rectangle provide improved contrast and alleviate this concern.

It’s an open question whether it would be worth adding a design element in the upper left to balance the left-justified “Harry”. I tried something like this in an image editor and I’m not sure it was worth it.

I previously referred to Team 13’s 2014 sign as “bare-vanilla minimalism,” since it consisted of red text on a white background with only very minimal design elements.

This sign is less minimal, introducing as it does a new color (black) and a non-trivial design element that also serves to identify the candidates as ”Team 13”. I don’t think the black text is all that readable against the black background, but the sign accomplishes its purpose, namely to associate the names of the candidates in your mind as members of a slate. The text for those names looks good and has good contrast with the background.

Another blast from the past, this time from Courtney Watson, as she updates the sign design she used in 2010 in her (successful) race for County Council, abandoning the 2014 design she used in her (unsuccessful) race for County Executive. A bit of superstition, perhaps?

Here’s my review of the 2010 sign:

Large text that conveys only the basic information needed, nice contrasting typefaces (with the top one lending an air of liveliness to the sign), a unique choice of complementary colors (including a subtle gradient on the bottom half), and good balance in the design between the top half, the bottom half, and the white border. But what really takes this design from good to great is the stand of wheat to the right: it adds visual interest, ties back to the official Howard County seal, and evokes the rural past of the country in a way calculated to appeal both to conservative older residents and more liberal newcomers concerned about environmental issues. This one got my vote for the best Howard County campaign sign of 2010.

The new sign adds her first name (in the same case and typeface as her last name) but otherwise retains the virtues of the 2010 sign, with one exception: I think the white border on this sign is too wide, especially at the top.

I think the typeface on this sign is too thin, and the Maryland flag design element on the right may be too subtle, but this sign has a problem that has nothing to do with the design itself: Apparently the material of which the sign is made is so thin/transparent that parts of the other side of the sign show through in reverse. It’s both disconcerting and makes the sign less readable.

This is the classic “chalk on blackboard” theme for a sign for a Board of Education race, a design last used by Bob Ballinger in the 2010 election, if I remember right. This version is a bit busier than Ballinger’s, mainly due to the slogan at the bottom, but otherwise it’s a good example of this particular type of sign, legible with an attractive color.

I’m not a big fan of slogans on campaign signs, but I have to admit that “best in class” is a good pun. I also like the little mortarboard design element taking the place of the “i” in “Anita.”

Note that on Facebook Anita Pandey pointed me to an alternate design for this sign. I couldn’t see it too well because the image was small, but it looked like the alternate version replaced the “i” in “Anita” with a more extensive design element that combines a scroll (representing a diploma, presumably) and mortarboard, both drawn in a more cartooney fashion. In my opinion the original version is preferable; its version of the mortarboard design element is more subtle and doesn’t pull focus from the candidate’s name.

I’ve now commented on 29 signs out of a total of almost sixty for which I have pictures. Hopefully it will be all downhill from here. Check Twitter and Facebook for the next article, and don’t forget to vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: I continue my look at 2018 campaign signs in Howard County with signs from Melanie Harris, Janet Siddiqui, Shahan Rizvi, Reid Novotny, Scott Berkowitz, Deb Jung, Larry Pretlow, Vicky Cutroneo, Raj Kathuria, and Jim Walsh.

No rest for the weary, as I continue looking at 2018 campaign signs for local Howard County races. (“Local” here means not statewide and not for Federal positions.) This time I step up the pace a tiny bit and review ten different signs, again in random order. For more on this series see part 1.

This is a reasonable looking sign, albeit somewhat dense and crowded in terms of the amount of information it tries to fit in. However the candidate’s name is quite readable, and the sign makes it clear what office she’s running for. Though busy the design is also relatively clean, with good use of the Maryland flag and some variation in the typefaces across the multiple lines of text.

Regarding the amount of information, I can see in a way why she included her website name on the sign: “Melanie Harris” is a fairly common name, and an Internet search for it returns a lot of irrelevant results. Also, the obvious website choice of “melanieharris.com” seems to be taken by someone else, with the site not even loading properly. Thus presumably the desire to highlight the candidate’s website “harrisinthehouse.com”—which I admit is a clever domain name.

But was it necessary to add a slogan too? One point to note is that the slogan is somewhat at odds with the sign design: “Smaller Government” is of course a standard Republican slogan, but the sign colors are green and white, colors traditionally associated with Democrats. I can’t help thinking this sign would have been more internally consistent in its messaging if it were in red, white, and blue.

Another example of a candidate, or more precisely, the candidate’s family, having a favorite color: orange was also prominently featured in Nayab Siddiqui’s 2014 sign, although in his case it was orange with black rather than orange with blue (as here).

This sign uses a particularly bright orange that really stands out. The white outlines around the letters in ”Siddiqui” also helps readability, as can be easily seen if you compare them to the letters in “County Council”. The text of ”Janet” and “Siddiqui” is in a good bold serif typeface that makes an impact without being too chunky. Unfortunately the text for “County Council” doesn’t quite go with it; I’m not sure if it’s the typeface, the lack of outlining, or the use of blue for the text color. (Would white have been better?)

Finally, why include the “M.D.” under Siddiqui? I can see this for a Board of Education race, but would anyone voting for a County Council candidate really care that Janet Siddiqui is a physician?

This is the first of several examples of a phenomenon I don’t recall seeing in 2014: campaign signs for Central Committee candidates. (Or, to be more specific, male Democratic Central Committee candidates; I haven’t seen any signs for female Democratic Central Committee candidates, nor for Republican Central Committee candidates.) I find it interesting that Shahan Rizvi would undertake the expense of making campaign signs, especially given that he’s a member of the “HoCo Forward” slate, and thus would presumably benefit from any promotion of that slate.

As for the sign itself, the colors are attractive, and the main thing is that the name “Rizvi” is both prominent and legible. However the typeface for “Shahan” seems a bit thin in comparison, as does the typeface used for the website name. In fact, the website name isn’t really all that readable. I wonder if it would have worked better in lower case.

Finally, the little cartoon is cute and lends an air of whimsy to the sign, but including two of them almost makes me think Rizvi is running as a pair of twins.

This is a solid sign—which is good, since Reid Novotny seems intent on plastering my section of Route 40 with these. The overall blue and white scheme has good contrast, and the spot of red in the upper left livens up the design and prevents it from being too monotone.

The typefaces are legible, and I like the strategy of placing “Reid” in the space opened up by the capital “N”. It’s mirrored by the design element with the star, which not only helps separate “Novotny” from “State Senate” but also fills the space opened up by the descender in the letter “y.”

Finally, since the design is pretty clean and uncluttered I don’t mind the addition of a slogan at the top. The slogan also helps contrast—in a relatively subtle way—Novotny’s candidacy from that of his primary opponent, incumbent Gail Bates.

Here’s another example of a campaign sign for the Democratic Central Committee race—and for another member of the HoCo Forward slate. It’s an attractive sign, with good legibility for the last name and a nice shade of blue.

But again I have to ask: Is it really necessary to include the fact that you’re a doctor, especially for a Central Committee race? I wouldn’t be so down on this except that I think the “MD” in small letters throws off the rest of the design.

There are a lot of things to like about this sign, including the typeface used for the names, so I was wondering why I found it a bit offputting. Then I figured it out: there’s no white border around the sign. Maybe it’s just me, but I find including a border helps frame the sign and highlight its content.

I have to admit, my first thought upon seeing this sign was, “Who is Larry?” Then I saw the slogan “Break the Slate!” and thought, “Oh, maybe this has to do with the Central Committee election and the HoCo Forward slate.” But I couldn’t remember seeing any Larrys on the ballot when I voted last Sunday. Then I looked more closely and saw “for Delegate” and the “13” on the donkey’s shirt, and finally figured it out: he’s running against the candidates of “Team 13.”

This is not really Larry Pretlow’s fault: I completely missed the “for Delegate” part in the lower part of the sign, which is in a larger font size than the “Break the Slate”. But it does illustrate the potential for confusion when voters see signs that don’t include all the relevant information about a candidate. (Before anyone comments, I’m aware that Krish Vignarajah also has signs that read simply “Krish for Maryland”. But as a gubernatorial candidate she has a higher media profile and thus presumably better name recognition.)

Sorry about the detour, now back to the sign itself: First, it’s a somewhat unusual shape relative to other signs. Other than that it’s a perfectly good looking sign. Blue or black text on a white background makes for high contrast, and the typeface is readable. I’m not a big fan of cartoons on signs, but this one is perfectly fine and doesn’t overshadow the rest of the sign.

I do wonder though about including “June 26th” on the sign. It makes the sign more crowded and I’m not sure it adds anything: if you know who “Larry” is, wouldn’t you also know when to vote?

Things to like about this sign: It has good legibility and impact for the candidate’s name, and I like the contract between the sans serif typeface used for the name and the slab serif typeface used for “Board of Education”. I like the two colors and the division of the sign’s area between them. I like including the endorsement logos within the sign itself, as opposed to slapping on stickers after the fact.

Things I don’t like: The two thin horizontal lines on either side of “Vicky” I think are necessary, but I’m not persuaded that it was necessary to include a similar thin line below “Cutroneo,” especially since there’s already a white area dividing that section of the sign from the lower part. I tried editing out the bottom line in an image editor and I think the sign looks better and (dare I say) more impactful without it.

Finally, it bothers me that the “Teacher Recommended” and “Ethics Star” logos aren’t quite at the same height. (Yes, I’m picky.)

This sign seems overly dark to me, with all white text against colored backgrounds. It also doesn’t help that the red is a relatively dark red. (Raj Kathuria may want to look to fellow Republican Warren Miller, whose signs have really good shades of red and blue.) Otherwise the sign has good legibility for the candidate’s name, but seems overly crowded with the secondary text at the top and bottom.

Finally, I could take or leave the little star-in-circle design elements used in dotting the “j” and “i”. I used my trusty image editor to change those elements to plain white circles; I think the sign looks quite fine without the stars.

This is far from being a bad sign, but I feel compelled to nitpick it a bit: The typeface for “Walsh” is bold, perhaps too bold: I feel the letters run together a bit too much, in a way that threatens to impair readability.

Also, I’m curious about the design elements in the lower left. The element that looks like two stalks of wheat is defensible enough: assuming that it is supposed to represent stalks of wheat, it’s a symbol of Howard County (especially the farms of Council District 5) and echoes similar elements on past signs for Courtney Watson and Bob Flanagan (among others). But what’s a set of scales doing on this sign? Walsh is running for County Council, not for Judge of the Orphans’ Court.

That’s it for today’s crop of signs. Keep an eye out on Twitter and Facebook for the next crop. In the meantime, vote for the best sign of those discussed in this article. If I get enough votes I’ll have a final runoff to determine the winner among all signs; otherwise you’ll just have to accept my choice.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: I take a look at 2018 campaign signs in Howard County. This first post features signs from Jon Weinstein, Dan Medinger, Mavourene Robinson, Greg Jennings, Leslie Smith Turner, Bob Glascock, Jen Mallo, Terry McAndrews, and Kim Oldham.

One of my interests is graphic design—not that I have any talent for it myself—and one of the ways I’ve manifested that interest is in critiquing political campaign signs. I did a delayed retrospective on 2010 campaign signs, and then later did a more full discussion of as many 2014 campaign signs as I could track down.

I had thought I’d take a break this year, especially since I’m doing a series of political posts that are much more time-intensive. However in going this weekend to vote at the Miller Branch library, the array of signs was so impressive that I couldn’t stop myself from taking pictures of all of them. And what’s the use of taking pictures if I don’t do anything with them?

So without first ado here’s the first post in a series that I hope I can complete by the time (primary) election day rolls around. Rather than organizing the signs by race I’m posting them in a random order, just to mix things up.

I’ve previously outlined the criteria I use in judging signs, but I’ll briefly summarize them here once more:

• Legibility, especially at a distance from a moving car.
• Including the most important information: the candidate’s name and the office sought.
• Attractive colors that don’t clash or impede legibility.
• Clean, professional typography that adds an extra “oomph” to the sign’s visual appearance.
• Effective use of other design elements to enhance the impact of the sign, not detract from it.

I will say that local candidates have upped their game this year in the sign department: I’ve seen fewer things I consider to be basic mistakes, and a higher percentage of pretty good-looking signs.

And with that, let’s look at some signs!

Based on his 2014 campaign signs there are three things I’ve noticed about Jon Weinstein: He likes blue, white, and yellow, he likes little stars, and he likes to promote his web site.

He’s continuing those themes in 2018, as you can see above, though with a twist: where the 2014 signs used white and yellow text on a blue background, the 2018 signs use yellow and blue on a white background.

The main knock I have against the 2018 sign is that it looks fairly crowded and busy with all the design elements and the website name. The yellow horizontal lines and the line of blue stars help to separate the textual elements, but they also make the sign very dense. There’s also not much variation in the typography to lighten the density: same typeface throughout and mostly all upper case except for the website name.

Like Jon Weinstein, Dan Medinger has his favorite colors, in this case green and white, the same as those used on his 2014 sign. I wrote of that sign that it was “competent and unexceptionable,” and I think that’s true of this sign as well. There’s really not a whole lot more I can say about it.

One interesting aspect of campaign signs is that a sign can be perfectly effective in promoting the candidate while not being all that elegant from a design standpoint. This sign for Mavourene Robinson is a good example of that: The yellow on blue and blue on yellow stands out well and has good contrast for readability; in fact, the “Robinson” almost bores its way into your brain.

On the down side, I’m not that fond of the blue and yellow color combination, and design-wise there’s nothing particular interesting about the sign: just a basic horizontal yellow/blue/yellow division of the background, and a simple mixing up of the typefaces for variety: mixed upper and lower case sans serif in the slogan, mixed upper and lower case italic serif in “Mavourene,” all upper case san serif in “Robinson,” and then back to mixed upper and lower case sans serif for “Board of Education.”

The bottom line: while this sign won’t win any design awards, it gets the job done.

Here’s an example of the opposite phenomenon to what I just discussed: a sign that is quite elegant from a design perspective, but has I think one significant problem as a campaign sign: The “Democrat for County Council” text is not much larger than the authority line at the bottom, and I suspect it will not be that readable from a distance or when driving by.

Otherwise this sign is a winner: The typography is quite nice, and the white on blue contrast for “Jennings” makes it stand out well, while the orange on blue text for “Greg” is a nice combination that’s pleasing to the eye. Two other little touches I really liked: the contrasting orange/italic/serif type for the word “for,” and the “wave” design element below that line. Those are the kinds of things that from a design perspective take a good sign and make it great.

As far as I can tell this is the exact same sign Leslie Smith Turner used in the 2014 campaign, so I’ll just repeat my previous comments:

This sign does a nice job of highlighting the candidate’s last name and the position being sought; it also highlights the fact that she’s an incumbent, which many voters might not know given that this is a relatively obscure courthouse race. I’m less enthusiastic about the burgundy color used for the text, and I’m not a big fan of the script used for “Re-Elect Judge.”

This is a good but not great sign, in my opinion: The candidate’s last name is quite readable, but his first name looks too small compared to the last name and (especially) the “Vote” design element. I think it might have looked better just omitting the first name and making the “Vote” element slightly larger. I’m also not overly fond of the typography: I think having three pieces of text in a serif typeface and italics is a tad monotonous.

The main problem I have with this sign is that “HCPSS Board of Ed” seems both awkwardly worded and a bit small and hard to read. The word “Board” in particular looks like the letter spacing is a bit too wide, with the “B” and “A” needing to be a bit closer to the “O.”

Otherwise the sign has no major problems. I do find the choice of red, white, and blue a bit odd though for a Board of Education race, as that color scheme is mostly used for partisan races, and in particular is a favorite of Republican candidates. Is this the design equivalent of a dog whistle? (I have no idea what Jen Mallo’s party affiliation is.) (UPDATE: Jen Mallo emailed me to say that the color choice was made by the graphic designer and that no dog whistle was intended.)

This sign, like some others past and present, tries to enliven the design by doing more interesting things with the sign background. That goal is accomplished here, with the only downside being that the actual sign part of the sign (that is, the part with the candidate’s name and office sought) seems like it’s just a smaller (and thus less visually prominent) sign within a sign.

Also, using mixed upper and lower case serif text is an unusual choice for the candidate’s name, most signs use all upper case sans serif for that. That choice may have been made because “McAndrews” is in CamelCase (as the programmers say) and doesn’t seem to read as well in all caps as “MCANDREWS.”

Every election year there are one or two signs that stand out from the pack and make me stop and do a double-take. Kim Oldham’s sign is one of those this year. (There seems to be something about the State’s Attorney races that brings out good sign design; Dario Brocollino’s sign was a standout in 2014.) The bold white type on a yellow background really pops out, and the design element at the top based on the Maryland flag is done quite well. The red text reading “State’s Attorney” is just a tad small for maximum readability, but I think it’s balanced nicely with the larger text of the name.

One interesting design decision was to place the first name “Kim” at the left rather than centering it above “Oldham”. I actually tried my hand at changing the design in an image editor, and found it’s a tough call as to whether left justification or centering looks better. What swayed me toward left justification is that there’s a slight asymmetry in the Maryland flag design element at the top, caused by keeping the yellow and black bars of equal width. Putting “Kim” to the left seems to balance off the asymmetry a bit.

That’s it for today’s group of signs. More critiques should be coming your way soon in part 2. In the meantime I’m trying something new by giving you the opportunity to vote on your favorite signs, starting with this first group: just click on the link to the part 1 SurveyMonkey survey and then pick which of the signs above you like best. It’s completely anonymous.

UPDATE: Voting is closed. See part 7 for all the signs that advanced to the final round.

tl;dr: Is there a class war going on? Yes, but it’s also an intra-elite war with others caught in the crossfire.

I’m continuing my series outlining my own answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. Here’s Jason’s fifth question:

Let’s assume that something called “class warfare” exists. If so, who has been winning? For how long? And in whose interest is it to continue the war?

My answer: I happen to think that class-driven social conflict is and has been a real thing. However, I don’t think it fits the classic “rich vs. poor” model of an undifferentiated upper class in conflict with an undifferentiated lower class. I see it as being just as much about conflict between elites themselves, with elite factions exploiting the woes of non-elites to try to recruit them as co-combatants.

My model here is the so-called Demographic Structural Theory or DST¹ originally advanced by sociologist Jack Goldstone and then elaborated by theoretical ecologist Peter Turchin and others.

“Class warfare” in pre-modern societies

DST originated out of a desire by Goldstone to explain why and when major revolutions (like the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917) occur, and more generally why civilizations throughout history have experienced periodic collapses of the social order. His goal, and the goal of Turchin and others who followed, was not to find a purely verbal explanation, but rather to try to mathematically model the rise and fall of societies using a restricted set of variables and historical data for those variables.

The resulting theory goes something like this:

In pre-modern societies based on agriculture, population growth depended almost entirely on the amount of farmable land relative to the population (since agricultural productivity changed only slowly over time). Society could be broadly divided into peasants who worked the land, an aristocratic elite who owned the land and lived off taxes extracted from the peasants, and a state apparatus headed by a supreme ruler and financed by the aristocracy and the peasantry.

That’s not to say that these groups were monolithic. For example, aristocrats ranged from those at the apex of society and power to minor nobility whose influence was limited to a small area. These in turn were comparable to rich peasants who had managed to amass enough land to enjoy some level of wealth (and indeed there was some flow between the two groups).

There were also two other classes in pre-modern societies, merchants and the clergy. Merchants are accounted for in DST primarily as potential aristocrats, e.g., through their purchase of noble titles. In this way they could convert wealth in the form of money into wealth in the form of land—the most prestigious and secure form of wealth in pre-modern agrarian societies.

From a DST perspective the clergy played two roles in pre-modern society: Their primary role was to provide legitimacy for those who ruled and arguments in support of the rulers’ actions. During times of conflict they would often be recruited to provide justifications for the claims of competing elite factions. Religious bodies also often owned land, and some high-ranking religious leaders might also be considered functionally part of the aristocracy.

When productive farmland was widely available the ranks of the peasants increased, and they in turn were able to support a larger and richer class of aristocrats and an expanded state. However as the overall population approached the carrying capacity of the land, peasants were less able to support themselves and a now greatly expanded aristocratic class.

The response of the aristocratic class was threefold:

• to increase as much as possible the income extracted from the peasantry, further worsening the peasants’ condition;
• to lessen their financial support of the state, putting strain on the state budget; and finally,
• to compete more vigorously amongst themselves for the limited number of lucrative and powerful aristocratic positions, leading to increased political conflicts within the aristocratic class and ultimately violent civil strife affecting the entire population.

The resulting conflicts could extend over decades or even centuries. At times they might be interrupted temporarily as one generation succeeded another and grew weary of the conflicts instigated by the previous ones. However the underlying trends of “popular immiseration,” “elite overproduction,” and the “fiscal crisis of the state” (to use Turchin’s terms) would continue unabated.

The eventual result was the fiscal collapse of the state, the collapse of the social order, a reduction in the size of the peasantry due to war, famine, and disease, and an accompanying reduction in the aristocratic class, either through violence or poverty (which returned some of them to the peasant class).

At that point the carrying capacity of the land was more than sufficient to support the reduced population, and the reduced aristocratic class was able to negotiate among themselves to end the conflict. Population growth could then resume and the cycle begin again.

As a purely verbal explanation this is reasonably plausible, and in fact in something close to this form dates back to the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. The achievement of Goldstone, Turchin and their colleagues was to express the theory in a reasonably simple mathematical form and validate the predictions made by the mathematics. Among other things, this required identifying key variables as inputs to the equations of the theory and using detailed historical data to assign values to those variables. (For example, Goldstone created a “political stress index” by which the levels of conflict within a society could be quantified.)

Demographic Structural Theory and the US

Although it’s far from being mainstream (it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page), my personal assessment is that Demographic Structural Theory does a pretty good job of explaining social change in the pre-modern world of agrarian societies. The $64,000 question, the one that makes DST potentially relevant to today’s America, is whether DST can be extended to modern industrial societies. This is a task that Peter Turchin has undertaken, most notably in his book Ages of Discord.

Conceptually the three major divisions of pre-modern society map to present-day society as follows:

• The peasants of traditional society correspond to the vast bulk of the modern population that subsists primarily on wage income.²
• The pre-modern aristocratic elite maps to the small fraction of the population that exercises political power either directly (as elected political officials) or indirectly (through having a large amount of influence on such officials). As in pre-modern times, this elite can range from having national influence to having only local influence (the modern equivalent of the country squire).
• The state apparatus includes the military; unionized police, firefighters, teachers, and other government employees; and an ancillary base of government contractors.

The merchants of pre-modern society have their counterparts in today’s wealthy investors, successful entrepreneurs, and corporate executives. Just as merchants would purchase titles of nobility, it’s not uncommon for such wealthy individuals to seek political office or to pursue political power through lobbying efforts and campaign contributions.

Finally the clergy of pre-modern society correspond to the modern-day “intelligentsia” that works in academia, the media, and think tanks of all political persuasions. As before, their primary role from a DST perspective is to legitimize political leaders and their actions and provide arguments for competing elite factions, although some of them (for example, owners of media empires) have political influence equivalent to or (in a few cases) greater than that of elected officials.

After the Industrial Revolution we now live in a post-Malthusian economy in which greatly increased agricultural productivity supports a larger population and greater prosperity without requiring a corresponding increase in the amount of land under cultivation. The focus thus moves from land per person to more general economic factors: the overall amount of goods and services produced, and the relative claims (in the form of money) that we each have to those goods and services.

Given his desire to mathematically model the evolution of American society, the problem for Turchin then became finding a new set of variables that could be used as input into the model. For example, as one measure of economic well-being for the non-elite he uses the ratio of wages to GDP per capita (suitably adjusted for inflation and with short-term fluctuations smoothed out). Similarly, as one measure of elite dominance he uses the ratio of the largest personal fortune to the average annual wage. (To give an idea of changes over time, that ratio is currently well above 1,000-to-1, where 40-50 years ago it was on the order of 100-to-1.)

Turchin then combines multiple variables to form an overall index of “popular well-being,” and a separate set of unconnected variables to form an overall index of “elite overproduction.” The result is shown in the figure above: long-term cycles in US history (on the order of a century or more in length), with popular well-being falling as elite overproduction grows, and vice versa.

Assuming that Turchin’s theory is valid, we now have a more comprehensive answer to Jason’s question: There is an inherent conflict between the interests of the elite and the interests of the populace at large. Since the 1960s popular well-being has fallen as elites have become more dominant, wages have been relatively stagnant compared to previous periods, and more and more of the wealth created by increased productivity and technological innovation has accrued to investors instead of to workers.

At the same time conflicts within the elite have grown, as more and more elite aspirants compete for political power and influence: paying more for access to elite educational institutions seen as gateways to power, raising the cost of political campaigns, and heightening the intensity of political disputes and the polarization of political views. Elite factions also exploit popular discontent to enlist non-elites to participate in these conflicts and help advance factional interests.

Looking to the future through a DST lens

If we accept Demographic Structural Theory as providing a useful framework for explaining the past and the present, the obvious next step is to use it to predict the future, and in particular to try to answer the following questions: what happens next? When will things get better? How will things get better?

In the short term (say the next ten years at least) DST predicts continued and possibly intensifying political and social conflicts, given that the underlying driving trends remain active. Although economic factors play a major role in providing the underlying conditions for these conflicts, it’s likely that the conflicts themselves will revolve around questions of group identity: cultural, religious, ethnic, and so on.

This is consistent with past experience in pre-modern societies: episodes like the Thirty Years’ War (which directly and indirectly killed over 8 million people) combined conflicts over religious identity (in that case between Catholics and Protestants) with conflicts between competing elites. Questions of group identity are typically very important to individuals, and will often take precedence over purely economic concerns.

Given that we live in an advanced post-industrial society, I think it unlikely that we’ll see anything like the famines and plagues that characterized conflicts in pre-modern times. However, if the cycle matches those of the past the upcoming years may see more severe pressure on government finances and major reductions in both middle-class and elite wealth—for example through future financial crises, recessions, or even an extended depression that is global in nature (and thus leaves investors no options as they “reach for yield”).

In the longer term there will presumably come a point when conflicts will moderate, as competing factions within a reduced elite negotiate some sort of “grand compromise,” a set of initiatives intended to improve popular well-being and reduce intra-elite conflicts. However this might be a few decades in the future.

If such a grand compromise occurs, what form it might take? In my previous posts I’ve outlined one possibility: the institution of more universal and comprehensive social insurance schemes designed to cushion individuals and families from economic uncertainty. However as I noted in my previous post, the initiatives resulting from such a compromise may not be considered entirely progressive in nature.

For example, the increase in well-being seen in the graph above for the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond was accompanied by an almost complete shutdown of immigration (seen as harming native workers), followed by the creation of social insurance schemes (i.e., Social Security and related programs) that were deliberately designed to disfavor African-Americans. Thus, for example, I would not be surprised to see a future compromise that included more stringent restrictions on immigration, withholding of expanded benefits from immigrants not yet citizens, or both.

As another example, one measure taken in the 1920s and 1930s to limit intra-elite competition was to institute informal quotas on Jewish applicants to Ivy League universities (couched as evaluating applicants on their “character and fitness”). This helped to ensure that the elite remained a relatively small and homogeneous group of WASPs for as long as possible.

I doubt we’ll see anything as crudely discriminatory as that in future attempts to end elite overproduction (although note that present-day Ivy league schools have been accused of having informal quotas on Asian-American students, justified on the basis of promoting diversity). However we’ve already seen state legislators and governors criticize university liberal arts programs and promote STEM programs and vocational training as alternatives. Thus it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that in response to political pressure “public Ivies” and other state-funded universities might severely cut back humanities and liberal arts programs that have traditionally served as a source of potential politicians and activists.

Rather than (or along with) attempting to restrict the number of elite aspirants, another approach would be to open up more opportunities for them. For example, the US has a very low number of Congressional representatives compared to its population, second only to India for national legislatures and an order of magnitude lower than that of other G8 countries like the U.K. and Italy.³

One can imagine a political compromise that would significantly increase the size of the House of Representatives, or even that of the Senate—for example by increasing the number of senators for the most populous states, or by allowing larger states like California to divide themselves into smaller states, each with its own pair of senators. Other measures to alleviate elite competition might include more draconian term limits (to increase the “churn” in legislatures) or pursuing more decentralization of government functions (which could increase the desirability of political positions at the state and local level compared to the national level).

One can imagine other elements of a potential grand compromise down the road, including measures to limit the impact of automation and globalization, and to give Americans a much greater share of the wealth produced by technological progress.

In any event, I don’t think there’s any chance of any such compromise happening anytime soon—for now our focus will be on navigating safely through the coming years of conflict—but it’s not too soon to start thinking about what a future and potentially better dispensation might look like.

A personal note

Reading this post over in final draft I could see people saying, “Wow, Frank, this sounds pretty cynical, sort of a ‘plague on both your houses’ take on the current political scene. Don’t you understand that there’s a right side and a wrong side in the battles now raging?”

First, if you’ve been following this series you should be able to tell that I’ve already picked a side, and which side it is. However, my interests as a citizen, taxpayer, and voter are not necessarily identical to the interests of my party’s elected officials or (especially) its major political donors. Hence my political positions need not be identical either.

Second, if politics is not literally war (and in a democracy it shouldn’t be) then it is ultimately about persuasion. I find that persuasion works better when I don’t insult or disrespect the people I’m trying to persuade, when I acknowledge the place they’re coming from and the interests they have, and when I recognize that they may know things I don’t.

This approach may not work if I’m trying to get elected to something, especially in the current climate, but I’m not. I’m simply trying to understand the underlying dynamics behind our present-day politics, and trying to think about how those dynamics might be resolved in a way that’s better for our country rather than worse.

For further exploration

I originally wrote about Peter Turchin’s work in a post in 2013. For more information on Demographic Structural Theory see the following:

• “Demographic Structural Theory: 25 Years On,” by Jack Goldstone. A 2018 review of how DST came to be conceived of by its originator, and its reception and elaboration over the years, published in a special issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution.
• “A Dynamic Analysis of American Socio-Political History. A Review of Ages of Discord: A Structural Demographic Analysis of American History by Peter Turchin,” by Peter Richerson. From the same issue of Cliodynamics, a review of Peter Turchin’s 2016 book Ages of Discord that summarizes its argument and assesses how well it explains historical reality.
• “Social Instability Lies Ahead, Researcher Says,” by Peter Turchin. A 2016 article that summarizes the arguments of Ages of Discord for a popular audience (with bonus Hari Seldon and Psychohistory analogies).
• “Return of the Oppressed,” by Peter Turchin. A 2013 article in which Turchin first popularized the arguments about modern American history that he later made in Ages of Discord.

As noted above, Peter Turchin is the most prominent present-day advocate of the Democratic Structural Theory, especially as applied to modern American society, and has published a number of books touching on various aspects of DST. In case you’re interested in reading any of them, here are my thoughts on each:

• Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall. I consider this early work (from 2003) to be the best book in terms of justifying the DST approach to history, and especially in explaining the particular forms that mathematical models must take in order to account for cycles of societal growth and collapse. Unfortunately it requires that you have some comfort with mathematics (including calculus) in order to get the most out of it.

• Secular Cycles (with Sergey A. Nefedov). Another specialist work, with less mathematics but a lot more data, that attempts to apply DST predictions to a wide range of pre-modern societies,

• War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires. A non-mathematical popular treatment of the ideas from Historical Dynamics and Secular Cycles, again applied to pre-modern societies. This is probably the best in-depth introduction to DST for the general reader. (It also outlines Turchin’s ideas about “metaethnic frontiers” as locations for new empires to arise.)

• Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. Turchin’s attempt to apply DST to American history up through the present. In my opinion it’s a sort of an in-between book, to its detriment: it’s too technical for a general audience, but doesn’t contain as many details on the models and supporting data as one might like, for those who want to dig deeper. (Turchin has published some supplementary material on his web site that partially makes up for this lack.)

tl;dr: How America’s pastime illustrates the tensions and trade-offs between liberty and equality.

In this post in my series outlining my answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms, I address Jason’s fourth question:

Thinking about the principles of liberty and equality, and this can apply to any given challenge (fiscal, social, etc…), how can they both be promoted to ensure that the “unalienable rights” of all Americans are protected?

What does it mean to be “free” or “at liberty”? What does it mean to be ”equal”?

Suppose someone tells you, “When I retire next year I’ll be free to travel the world.” In what senses are they using the word “free”? The most basic sense is that they are free from coercion: no one, including the government, is going to physically stop them from leaving the country and visiting others.

The next sense is liberty as individualism: they are not bound by social and familial obligations or restrictions that might otherwise keep them at home. They can live their life as they choose.

A third (but not necessarily final) sense is liberty as “capability”: they are healthy enough to travel, any disabilities they might have can be accomodated, and they have money to pay their way.

What about equality? One sense would consider us all equal in our in-born potential: that each of us could accomplish anything given sufficient will, opportunity, and support. We could be equal in a political sense, as in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. We could be morally equal in the sight of God, as the apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28. Finally, we could be equal in the rewards that accrue to us in our life and work.

My primary concern here is with freedom as capability, with the first and last senses of equality—to what extent are we equal in our abilities, and to what extent should we receive equal rewards—and how those connect with our political equality. To make the discussion more concrete, let’s talk about baseball.

One way in which we are not all created equal

Major League Baseball players are a rare breed: they’ve proven their ability to play in the major leagues and have the benefit of all the training and other support that their well-financed teams can provide. From a naïve point of view we’d therefore expect them all to demonstrate equal skills and ability.

This is not the case. As shown in the graph above, when measured by one common baseball statistic, the ability to get on base and hit for extra bases, Major League Baseball players show a wide range of performance, with the best players achieving at a level better than twice that of the worst.

More specifically the players’ performance roughly follows a so-called Gaussian distribution, with most players performing at an average or near-average level, some players performing significantly better than average, and some players performing significantly worse.

Gaussian distributions tend to arise when there are many factors influencing a certain measure, with each factor having a relatively small effect and being relatively independent of other factors. For example, when it comes to the ability to get on base and hit for power we can look to factors such as excellent eyesight, quick reaction time, good “hitting mechanics,” and so on.

Many other measures of personal characteristics follow a Gaussian distribution, including measures that are economically important. Thus we’d expect that people in general would differ in their ability to exercise the many competencies that various employers value: some would do a great job, some a poor job, and most a mediocre one.

It’s unlikely that a typical sandlot ballplayer could become a major league player, even given every opportunity and assistance possible. Similarly it’s unlikely that any given person could perform at a high level in every possible job, even if they were intensively trained from early childhood. Discussion of balancing liberty and equality must start with that fundamental premise.

How liberty magnifies inequalities

Back to baseball. We’ve seen that players’ abilities span a fairly wide range even in the major leagues, and in at least this case seem to be distributed in an approximately-Gaussian manner. We’d therefore naïvely expect that how much players were paid would follow a similar pattern, with most receiving an average salary, some significantly higher salaries, and some significantly lower salaries.

Again, this is not the case. Instead the distribution of salaries more closely resembles a Pareto distribution or “80-20” rule: most players have relatively low salaries and a few players have relatively high salaries. Looking at the same group of players as in the first graph, there is more than a 2-to-1 difference in performance as measured by OPS, but more than a 50-to-1 difference in pay. Why should this be so?

An important reason is that players are ultimately judged on helping their team win, and a relatively small edge in performance can result in a team winning rather than losing. These relatively small differences in performance will then be magnified into relatively large differences in compensation, resulting in a small group of highly-paid superstars separated by a relatively wide gulf from the mass of journeyman players.

The economist Robert Frank referred to this as the “winner-take-all” effect, “the result . . . of the spread of markets in which the value of production depends primarily on the efforts of only a handful of top players who are paid accordingly.”

Winner-take-all dynamics arise relatively easily in economies in which free trade and global communications allow companies to serve a larger market, thus increasing the returns from hiring top talents, and in which top talents are in turn free to move from firm to firm in pursuit of higher compensation. Thus increased (economic) freedom leads to increased (economic) inequality, above and beyond what we might expect simply from the distribution of peoples’ abilities and performance.

Inequality and the uncertainties of life

The disparity between journeymen players and superstars, wide as it is, is but one aspect of inequality in Major League Baseball. Further inequality arises because players have major league careers of different lengths, with many players’ careers cut short due to injuries, age-related declines in skills, or simply being marginal players more susceptible to being released.

As shown in the graph above, most players have relatively short careers. Given two players of equivalent skills, the player with the longer career will have greater lifetime earnings, especially if they play long enough to become free agents and enter into more lucrative contracts.

The minimum salary in Major League Baseball is quite high compared that of the typical employee. However, if a player spends only a short time in the major leagues and then has limited employment prospects after leaving baseball, their lifetime earnings may be no greater than those of a middle-class worker with a steady job and a good salary.

Of course, the traditional “steady job with a good salary” can be hard to find nowadays for many if not most people, with wages for many people stagnant and part-time or contingent employment increasingly common even for people who’d like to work full-time.

Just as in baseball, this dynamic further increases inequality, particularly wealth inequality: people who make less or have unexpected expenses (e.g., due to ill health) are less able to save and have less opportunity to acquire assets such as a house, stocks, or bonds that can provide compounding of wealth over time.

The politics of liberty and equality

Thus in baseball as in life, individual differences in ability and performance are magnified into large differences in compensation, and these in turn combine with the random events of life to cause even large differences in overall wealth. But someone might reply, “Is this really a problem? And if it is, can we solve it without unduly restricting peoples’ liberty?”

For example, one argument is that peoples’ compensation is merely a reflection of the added value they provide to those who pay them, their so-called “marginal product.” Such compensation is therefore deserved, and to interfere in compensation arrangements erodes the incentives provided by a free market.

If this were the case then we should see salaries in baseball track reasonably closely with statistics that attempt to measure a player’s value to a team. But this is not necessarily the case: as shown in the graph above, a player’s salary is only loosely related to the particular measure of performance that is OPS.

Long-term contracts account for part of this, since they uncouple present pay from immediate past performance to some extent. It’s also possible to use more sophisticated measures of baseball performance to determine compensation, for example “wins above replacement” or WAR. Yet arguments still rage over whether some players are significantly undercompensated relative to their performance, and others significantly overcompensated.

The situation is even worse outside baseball, where in a large firm it is often not clear at all how much value a particular employee is adding to the firm’s bottom line, especially for general corporate support functions. This makes it difficult to judge whether any particular person “deserves” what they are paid.

A related argument is that as long as compensation is the result of voluntary agreements freely entered into, any attempt to change the resulting distribution of income and wealth is an unwarranted restriction on liberty.

But is baseball compensation really the result of an unrestricted market free of any political considerations? The short answer is no. First, Major League Baseball is the unique beneficiary of an exemption from US antitrust law that allows MLB team owners to collude in ways that would be considered illegal restraint of trade in other industries. Second, not-so-uniquely Major League Baseball players are organized into a union, an activity permitted and protected by relevant labor laws and overseen by the Federal government.

Thus salaries are not based purely on free-market considerations but rather are in large part the result of negotiations between team owners and players considered collectively. This is a struggle into which questions of fairness and justice almost inevitably intrude, which is subject to government interference on behalf of either side, and thus which can be characterized as political as well as economic.

This is true in the wider economy as well: the economic rewards that each person receives are a function not just of their talents but of the political, social, and economic system in which people exercise those talents. The entire system can then be judged on well it performs for those who participate in it.

Pursuing democratic equality

Where does that leave us? First, it’s clear that the freedom that people enjoy has increased greatly compared to the past, even if many still do not enjoy it to the same degree as others: Liberal democracies have greatly lessened the burden of government coercion; evolving social mores mean people are less subject to social strictures; and science, technology, and the free market have made necessities of life like food, clothes, and transportation more affordable—while making it easier than ever to satisfy what we desire beyond the bare necessities.

At the same time it’s also clear that an inherently unequal distribution of talents and other non-monetary assets is further magnified by the free-market system. This in turn lessens the extent to which many enjoy freedom in the sense of capability, even though economic freedom and individualism may be greater than ever before.

Given that, what (if anything) should we do about it? And how should we justify any policies we adopt? I’ll address the latter question first, since the justifications for addressing inequalities help determine the means by which we might do so.

This question is often reduced to a binary opposition between ensuring equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. This is both simplistic and unrealistic. Ensuring equality of opportunity is certainly consistent with promoting freedom as noncoercion and freedom as individualism. However given inequalities of talent and the dynamics of a free market system in magnifying those inequalities, it cannot in and of itself promote freedom as capability.

On the other hand, ensuring true equality of outcomes is difficult to impossible. Even in a system not organized around free markets natural differences in talent and other personal characteristics would lead to inequalities in outcomes, inequalities that history shows us could be rectified only at the expense of severely limiting freedom.

That might seem to leave only a practical justification for reducing inequalities, such as that recently offered by Samuel Hammond and others: that providing a generous system of social insurance is the best way to bolster support for the free market and stave off the growth of anti-market populism. This seems plausible, but as a justification it has a “bread and circuses” flavor to it, implying as it does that equality matters only as a way of promoting political peace.

I prefer philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s conception of what she calls “democratic equality,” which focuses on freedom from domination and our relationship to our fellow citizens: that “people are entitled to whatever capabilities are necessary to enable them to avoid or escape entanglements in oppressive social relationships . . . and to the capabilities necessary for functioning as an equal citizen in a democratic state.”

People can meet each other in equality as fellow fans of a team, whether they sit in the luxury boxes or in the cheap seats (or watch from home). The ideal of democratic equality is for people to be able to similarly meet each other in equality as fellow citizens, even if their personal circumstances are very different. What must happen for them to be able to do this?

First, it helps if there exist opportunities for everyone to be a productive member of society and to seek excellence in their own way. This is one of the benefits of a free-market economy: that entrepreneurial innovation can create not just new jobs, but different kinds of jobs. Had basketball not been invented and baseball been the only professional sport, we might know Michael Jordan (if we knew him at all) only as a better-than-average minor league player. Similarly a dynamic free-market economy provides spaces for all sorts of talents, especially when it helps support a vibrant civil society.

Second, there must be a level of subsistence below which people cannot fall, and as much as possible a minimum return for the work they perform. Baseball’s minimum salary for new players means that everyone who advances to the major leagues starts out in roughly the same position, and ensures that the intense competition between players eager to join an MLB team does not leave them vulnerable to owners eager to squeeze payrolls as much as possible. Minimum wages in other contexts, as well as related schemes like wage subsidization, can function similarly, providing benefits for workers sufficient to compensate for the downsides (e.g., higher prices to others).

Third, people should be buffered to some extent from the unforeseeable events of life. Long-term contracts in baseball not only allow team owners to retain stars and likely stars, they also provide players a reasonably guaranteed return on their work regardless of what might happen in the future. Similarly schemes like government-provided universal catastrophic coverage can help ensure that people and their families do not suffer financial ruination due to ill health, but can instead plan for the future knowing that their health care costs will never exceed an undue percentage of their income.

The support given to people in support of democratic equality is to enable them to participate in democratic life with others. It should therefore be provided to everyone as a matter of course, like Social Security or Medicare, and not be means-tested. This avoids singling out some among us as the objects of our charity and pity—and thereby risking their in turn becoming the objects of resentment.

It’s also desirable that such programs be funded at least in part by sources that are in some sense “owned” by all of us or stand apart from us. One example at the state level is the Alaska Permanent Fund, which issues “dividends” to Alaskans based on their perceived common interest in the state’s oil resources. Similar assets at the national level include rights to public lands or portions of the electromagnetic spectrum auctioned off to telecommunications companies for their use. This again helps avoid characterization of social insurance programs as simply forced redistribution from “makers” to “takers.”

In this vein, recall that the idea of democratic equality involves making it possible for us to stand before each other equally as fellow citizens. But pursuing democratic equality for all citizens does not necessarily require pursuing it for anyone else. It’s not unreasonable for Americans to believe that they owe more to those who are their fellow citizens than to those who are not.

We can and should welcome those who want to become Americans, but at the same time we can justify withholding the full benefits of being a citizen until they complete their own paths to citizenship. Until that time the taxes they pay could be dedicated to help fund universal social insurance schemes for those who are already citizens.

Suppose that we agree that achieving the democratic equality of all American citizens is a worthy goal. Suppose also that we have some idea of what measures might best promote this. What’s stopping us from implementing them? The problem is that these measures require that we take collective action via government, and the ongoing influence of individualism and group identity politics (of all flavors) have impacted our ability to take such actions.

As I write in my next post, this deficit of collective will may continue for the foreseeable future. But there may come a time when we can adapt the words of Paul to our contemporary situation, and say that as citizens there is no longer white or black, there is no longer rich or poor, there is no longer red state or blue state, for all of us are equal as Americans.

Further exploration

The following provide additional background for and expansions of the topics discussed in this post:

• “Talent and the Winner-Take-All Society” by Robert Frank discusses the phenomenon of increased inequality in free-market economies due to “winner-take-all” dynamics. (See also Frank’s and Philip Cook’s book The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us.)
• “What is the point of equality?” (ungated version [PDF]) by Elizabeth Anderson criticizes “luck egalitarianism” and lays out her alternative vision of “democratic equality.” (See in particular pages 316-321 and the conclusion on pages 336-337.)
• “Common Property: How Social Insurance Became Confused with Socialism” is a popular article by Anderson that touches on many of the same themes, including a look back to Thomas Paine and his social insurance proposal.
• “The free-market welfare state: Preserving dynamism in a volatile world” by Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Center proposes a strengthened welfare state as the best approach to maintaining a free-market system. (See also the Twitter thread announcing the paper and the Washington Post interview of Hammond discussing his views.)
• “A Health Care Plan That’s Universal and Bipartisan” by Ed Dolan (also of the Niskanen Center) outlines one approach to ensuring that all Americans can cope with the costs of health care.

Finally, for the calculations and data behind the graphs above, see “Baseball salaries vs. performance” and the source code for that article in the seven-answers code repository.

tl;dr: How to promote racial equality? Possible places to start: reducing crime, improving policing, and promoting voting.

I’m continuing my series of posts in which I give my own answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. Here’s Jason’s third question:

Racial discrimination continues to plague our nation. This is evident in our workforce (hiring practices, income disparities, opportunities for advancement, etc…), in the administration of our criminal justice system, in systemic efforts to disenfranchise voters based on race, in the relative dearth of substantive environmental protections for communities where people of color constitute a large percentage of the population, and in other facets of American life. What steps can and should be taken to address these issues?

Before I get into the main body of this post I’ll say a couple of things up front:

First, I think questions like this are ultimately best answered by people who (unlike me) are part of minority populations, since they’re the people most directly affected by the issues under discussion and the people who will have to live with whatever policies get adopted to address them. But Jason directed these questions to all candidates, not all of whom are racial minorities, and all of us as voters will end up weighing the candidates’ answers. So I’ll put my two cents’ worth in as well.

Second, although Jason refers to “racial discrimination” in general, my comments are specifically directed to issues relevant to African Americans. Those issues are what most people think about when the subject of “race in America” comes up, and they’re major factors in politics at the local, state, and national level—as they have been for the past two hundred years or more.

So given that, what are my own thoughts? As is evident from Jason’s question, questions of race and racial discrimination arise in many areas of life, and it would be overly ambitious of me to try to address all or even most of those areas. I’ll instead focus on a few areas that I think are fundamentally important and where there appears to be good reason to think that improvements can be made.

Crime

The first two areas are crime and policing, specifically ensuring that African Americans do not suffer a disparate impact from criminal violence, and that measures to reduce crime do not themselves cause a disparate impact on the ability of African Americans to live their lives in dignity and freedom.

Reducing crime is fundamental because ensuring the security of its citizens is the first and foremost task of any government. Improving policing is fundamental because we expect our governments to go about the task of ensuring citizens’ security in a way that embodies the ideals of a liberal democracy, as opposed to resembling the practices of a police state, an occupation force, or a paramilitary group.

No one should have to live in an environment marked by constant criminal violence. In addition to its effects on individuals, it has a corrosive effect on the neighborhoods and cities in which it occurs. Efforts to build communities and promote their economic development cannot be expected to succeed in the absence of adequate security for their inhabitants.

Why should we expect progress can be made? Because progress has in fact already been made in some respects, as can be seen in the graph above. Murder is the most extreme outcome of criminal violence, and the rate at which people become victims of murder has gone down dramatically over the past decades.

This is even true for African American men, who are murdered at significantly lower rates today than in 1995, the first year for which I was able to find data. (Given the trends apparent in the graph for murder rates in general, I suspect that the rate prior to 1995 was even higher, and thus the reduction from its peak even more significant.)

Although murder rates for African Americans remain too high compared to the overall US murder rate (not to mention those in other countries), this reduction is no small thing. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey points out that given the reduction in the murder rate thus far, “The drop in homicide mortality increased [life expectancy] of African American males by .72 years . . .—roughly equivalent to the estimated impact of eliminating obesity altogether.”

There is still a lot of variability around the country in murder rates. But this variability also shows that there is significant room for improvement at the local level: there are cities that have similarly low murder rates despite being very dissimilar demographically and otherwise, and cities with very different murder rates that we’d expect to be otherwise comparable.

Policing

So things have gotten better, and could potentially get better still. But could this be done without subjecting minority communities to overly aggressive policing? Just as we can look to murders as representing the extreme end of criminal violence, we can look to police killings of unarmed people as emblematic of citizen concerns about police actions.

The number of police killings of unarmed individuals is relatively low when viewed in the context of killings overall, and especially low in relation to the total population. For example, in 2015 police killed 75 unarmed African American men, just over 1% of the more than 7,000 African American men murdered that year, with the chances of any particular African American man being killed by police being extremely low. Some commentators have used these statistics to argue that the problem of police killing African Americans has been blown out of proportion.

But even a few killings exert a large influence on people’s perception of police behavior, similar to how even a few terrorist incidents influence political responses to terrorism. For example, as noted above, of all African American men who died violent deaths in 2015, about 1 in 100 were killed by police while unarmed. If we look at men of other races who died violent deaths in the United States from 1995 through 2016, the fraction of those deaths due to terrorism (including the 9/11 attacks) is almost exactly the same: about 1 in 100.

If we look at the post-9/11 years the fraction is even lower: Of nonblack men who died violent deaths from 2002 through 2016, only about 1 in 1000 were killed by terrorists, and only about 1 in 2000 by Islamic extremists.

The shadow of 9/11 still hangs over US politics, and it’s not surprising that it does: of nonblack men who died violent deaths in 2001, 1 in 5 died in the 9/11 attacks—a number so large it caused the FBI to omit 9/11 from crime statistics for 2001, presumably lest it distort analysis of historical trends. Federal, state, and local governments continue to spend billions of dollars a year to protect Americans from the threat of terrorism, with combating Islamic terrorism the main political focus.

But as an ongoing problem today the problem of unarmed African American men being killed by police is an order of magnitude worse than the problem of other men being killed by terrorists in general, much less by Islamic terrorists. Thus it’s reasonable in my opinion for governments to take the necessary actions and allocate the necessary funding (e.g., for better police training) to reduce police killings and other instances of police-initiated violence to as low an amount as possible.

Again, the data suggest there is definite room for improvement: Rates at which police kill African Americans vary widely across different jurisdictions (almost by an order of magnitude), and at first glance there’s apparently no strong relationship between rates of killings and overall crime rates. This suggests that many police departments could in fact do their jobs in a way that is both more effective in reducing crime and more acceptable to the communities they serve.

Voting

Of course, improving policing in this way requires electing officials who are motivated to take the necessary actions to do so. This leads into my recommendation for another key action for reducing racial discrimination and promoting racial equality, namely making sure that the political power of African American voters properly reflects their presence in the general population.

This includes a wide variety of issues and actions: registering more African American voters, making sure they’re motivated and able to get to the polls, working against laws and regulations that may have a disparate impact on African American voters, and addressing broader issues like gerrymandering of electoral districts to favor one political party over another.

I don’t have time or space in this post to do an in-depth treatment of the controversies around measures like voter ID laws and the like, and render a considered judgement on all the claims and counter-claims that people have made around voter fraud, the need to protect the security of elections, etc. Instead I’ll just “state my priors” and describe the underlying principles I think are relevant here.

First, America has a history here, and not a very good one. Arguments advocating (for example) strong voter identification systems and noting their uncontroversial use in other nations would play a lot better if there wasn’t a long tradition of disenfranchising African American voters in various ways, and if present-day politicians didn’t make claims about “massive electoral fraud” far in excess of any potential reality.

Second, it’s a general principal of security that it is far easier to commit extensive fraud with computers than with people. (For example, the weak link in many traditional “cybercrime” schemes is the need to recruit “money mules,” US-based individuals who receive money fraudulently transferred from victims and transfer it on to the perpetrators in other countries.)

Thus I would put a significantly higher priority on securing voting systems themselves, including requiring a paper audit trail for all votes, than I would on worrying about whether someone could possibly vote as someone else, vote twice, vote out of their jurisdiction, or vote when they’re ineligible to do so.

Acting locally

A final thought: Jason directed his questionnaire at local candidates generally, including candidates for the Maryland legislature, the Howard County council, and the county executive. There’s another set of elections occurring, namely the so-called “courthouse races.” These are for positions that are relatively obscure to most people (for example, Judges of the Orphans Court) and thus don’t receive a lot of attention.

However one of these positions is particularly relevant to the issues I’ve discussed above, namely that of State’s Attorney, the person who decides which criminal cases to prosecute and how to go about doing so. Local prosecutors occupy a key position in the criminal justice system. It would be interesting to hear candidates’ thoughts on how best to achieve the twin goals of reducing crime and improving policing, with a view to improving the lives of African Americans in Howard County and elsewhere in Maryland.

Further exploration

I found the most interesting analysis of crime and policing issues to be that of Patrick Sharkey, as outlined in his book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence. Of course, “interesting” does not necessarily equal “true,” but I found Sharkey’s treatment to be both not obviously wrong and not overly ideologically biased.

Here are some more references relating to Uneasy Peace:

• “Two Lessons of the Urban Crime Decline.” A New York Times op-ed by Sharkey briefly summarizing some of the arguments from the book.
• “Uneasy Peace: Supplemental Slides for Empirical Analysis. A slide presentation by Sharkey summarizing the empirical arguments in Uneasy Peace and the supporting data. If you’re not put off by graphs and (a couple of) numeric tables, I think this is the best single expression of Sharkey’s arguments.
• Two reviews of Uneasy Peace from liberal and conservative commentators respectively:
  • “The Great Crime Decline: Drawing the right lessons from the fall in urban violence.” Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker magazine.
  • “An ‘Uneasy Peace’ and the Search for Durable Cities.” Edward Glaeser in the Wall Street Journal.

Other articles and sites worth checking out:

• “The Counted: People killed by police in the US.” A database maintained by The Guardian newspaper on people killed by police (for whatever reason). It allows filtering by demographic groups, unarmed vs. armed victims, and so on.
• Mapping Police Violence. A combined data and advocacy site focusing on police killings and related violence.
• “Better Policing Is the Best Criminal-Justice Reform.” A National Review article by Rachel Wu that encourages conservatives to adopt a “law-and-order, civil-rights reform agenda” based on “high-quality policing” and “diminish[ing] our society’s reliance on incarceration.”
• “Voting rights in the United States.” This Wikipedia article is a good summary of political controversies over voting rights in the US since its establishment, including attempts to eliminate or dilute the political power of African Americans.
• “The single most important person to reform the criminal justice system is not . . ..” An article by Shaun King in which he explains why he’s shifting the focus of his activism to electing reform-minded prosecutors. (He subsequently founded the Real Justice PAC).

Finally, for the calculations and data behind the graph above and other numerical statements in this post, see “US murder rates and deaths from terrorism” and the source code for that article in the seven-answers code repository.

Even before writing my previous post, seeing yet another person on the Internet refer to “socialist Sweden” had prompted me to channel the spirit of that great American Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Jr.

My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about socialism. All right, here is how I feel about socialism:

If when you say socialism you mean that system in which government controls the means of production, distribution, and exchange, the devil’s brew of political interference in economic decisions large and small, the poison scourge of cronyism and corruption, the bloody monster of central planning, that defiles the market, dethrones economic reason, destroys the home and workplace, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil regimes that have toppled millions of men and women from the pinnacle of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say socialism you mean the provision of a robust safety net, the philosophic quest for social justice, the positive externalities created when good people get together in support of each other, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean a basic measure of economic security that gives Christmas cheer to workers and their families; if you mean the stimulating spending that puts the spring in the stagnant economy in the frosty depths of depression; if you mean the system which enables men and women to magnify their in-born potential, and their economic well-being, and to have some measure of protection against life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that system, the taxes of which pour into our treasuries untold billions of dollars, which are used to provide universal health care for our little children, our neighbors with disabilities, our aged and infirm, and any one of us caught up in calamities we could neither foresee nor forestall; to build highways and hospitals and schools and provide the foundations for an advanced liberal democratic society and capitalist economy, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

For further exploration

For a good example of people being confused about supposed “socialism,” see the following:

• “Socialism’s Rising Popularity Threatens America’s Future”. A National Review writer worries about the increased appeal of “socialism” to American voters.
• “ACFI survey reveals details about the ideology gap separating Americans”. A press release summarizing the results of a survey by the American Culture and Faith Institute in which 37% of those surveyed preferred “socialism” to “capitalism,” including 54% of self-described liberals, 37% of self-described moderates, and 23% of self-described conservatives.

tl;dr: What is social democracy? My preferred definition is dynamic capitalism plus liberal democracy plus an effective social safety net.

I promised to give my own answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. Here’s Jason’s second question:

What are your thoughts on social democracy?

My answer: First, I really wish Jason had asked, “What are your thoughts on socialism?,” because I had a snappy answer already written and ready to post on that particular topic. But no matter: once I answer this question, I’ll answer that other one in a special bonus post.

So, “social democracy.” Wikipedia defines it as

a political, social and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and capitalist economy, as well as a policy regime involving a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution and regulation of the economy in the general interest and welfare state provisions.

The Wikipedia article then goes on to give as real-life examples of social democracy the “socioeconomic policies that became prominent in Northern and Western Europe—particularly . . . in the Nordic countries.”

Couched in those terms there is little I would disagree with and much to approve of, especially concerning the desirability of looking at Denmark, Sweden, etc., as possible models. But—and this is a big but—we have to be very clear on what a workable and sustainable “social democracy” might mean in practice, and especially clear on what the “Nordic model” really consists of.

Many people seem to dislike market-based economies on principle, and lament the pervasive presence of markets in our lives. Some seem to use the term “social democracy” as a synonym for “socialism” (or at least a sort of “socialism lite”), with the general idea that it’s a possible and desirable alternative to “capitalism.” To my mind this is very much not the case.

In particular, some people speak of our present economic system as “late capitalism,” seemingly in the hope and expectation that capitalism is on its last legs and will soon be replaced by a presumably kinder and gentler system, whether we call that system “socialism” or “social democracy” and something else. But it makes no more sense to speak of “late capitalism” than it does to speak of “late agriculture.”

Just as there is no viable alternative to basing an advanced human society on intensive agriculture, there is no viable alternative to basing an advanced human society on a market-based economy in which the vast majority of economic decisions are made via a price system, in which some form of capital-based finance exists, and in which—except for certain limited exceptions—everyone secures their daily bread through a combination of capital investment in productive ventures and selling their labor (or the fruits thereof) on the open market. Venezuela is but the latest example that supposed alternatives to capitalism simply do not work in practice.

However, the agriculture of today is not the agriculture of the past: thanks to (among other things) capitalism, almost all of us are freed from being tied to the land and working the fields from sunrise to sunset. Likewise, the agriculture of today is not necessarily the agriculture of the future: changes in social attitudes drive changes in agricultural practices (for example, preferences for organic produce and meat from more humanely-raised animals), and innovations in technology may expand our ideas of what it means “to farm” (for example, industrial production of “synthetic meat”).

Similarly it’s possible to imagine a system that is very much capitalistic in nature without at the same time exposing us to the ravages of a predatory capitalism “red in tooth and claw.” Moreover, we have actual existing societies to point to as examples of this.

So, Frank, do you mean that (for example) Sweden is not a “socialist” country? Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. The key point about today’s “Nordic model” is not that it demonstrates the viability of “socialism,” it’s that it combines measures many think of as “socialist” (high taxes and redistributionist measures) with a capitalist system that in many respects is significantly more unrestricted than what we have in the US.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the “Index of Economic Freedom” produced by the Heritage Foundation, generally thought of as a conservative think tank. As you might expect, the index prioritizes government policies friendly to businesses (including those that increase the power of employers over employees) and penalizes countries with high levels of government spending.

But even with that thumb on the scale, in the 2018 index “socialist” Sweden is ranked #15, three places above the US (#18), and at #12 Denmark is six places above the US. (Norway and Finland are ranked #23 and #26 respectively.)

How can this be? The answer is simply that at present the Nordic countries are not in fact “socialist” by any reasonable definition. They do have extensive social insurance schemes and redistributive policies, but they combine those with a commitment to economic liberty and a capitalist economy. (Most notably, Sweden’s ranking in the Index of Economic Freedom increased from #26 in 2009 to #15 in 2018.)

For example, in the US many politicians have promoted laws to require that employers pay their employees a “living wage.” But in Denmark, Sweden, and other Nordic countries there is no statutory minimum wage. If an employer wants to offer an employee the equivalent of $1 per hour, and the employee is willing to take it, as far as I can tell the state will not intervene to prevent it.

Does that mean that employees in these countries are at the mercy of greedy capitalists? No, because in practice most employees are covered under collective bargaining agreements negotiated within the various industry sectors between companies and unions. (What is thought of as the “minimum wage” in those countries is simply an average of negotiated base wages across sectors.) Thus we shouldn’t automatically assume that “living wage” legislation is an absolutely necessary component of a “social democracy.”

(On the flip side, both progressives and libertarians should push back hard on the idea that so-called “right to work” laws have anything to do with freedom and liberty. They are simply government restrictions on the freedom of private companies to enter into exclusive arrangements with suppliers of labor, no different in principle than laws that would prohibit private companies from entering in exclusive arrangements with vendors providing other goods and services.)

At the heart of the discussion about “social democracy” are two independent but related propositions:

First, that social insurance schemes and redistributive measures in general are conceptually separate from government regulations on economic activities. It is possible to both provide a robust social safety net (funded by relatively high taxes) and at the same time significantly loosen regulations imposed on businesses.

Second, that a robust social safety net and an invigorated capitalist economy are not just compatible, but rather are each necessary for the continued success of the other. Without strong economic growth governments do not have the fiscal base needed to fund a safety net, and without a robust safety net people are reluctant to let capitalist innovation work its magic.

Policy advocate and commentator Will Wilkinson sums things up nicely:

A sound and generous system of social insurance offers a certain peace of mind that makes the very real risks of increased economic dynamism seem tolerable to the democratic public, opening up the political possibility of stabilizing a big-government welfare state with growth-promoting economic liberalization.

(He goes on to note, “This sense of baseline economic security is precisely what many millions of Americans lack.”)

Now, for reasons I go into in a future post I think such a “grand bargain” between progressive advocates of “social justice” and conservative and libertarian advocates of “business friendly” policies is extremely unlikely at the national level, and will remain so for some time to come.

Could progress be made at the local level? Maryland has more than its share of government regulations that are arguably unnecessary or at least overly restrictive (case in point: why can’t I buy beer and wine at my local Giant Food store?). One can make the case that we’d be better off economically, and no worse off otherwise, if many of these regulations were repealed or revised.

Maybe there’s a possible deal that could be struck at the state level: maintain or even expand the current tax base and use it to provide a comprehensive program of health care and other social provisions for Marylanders (making up for shortfalls at the national level), in exchange for a thoroughgoing review and reduction of Maryland regulations affecting businesses and their employees.

I’ll leave it to local political experts like Jason and others to tell me whether this is just a pipe dream. However as a Maryland voter and taxpayer this is a policy approach I’d be more than willing to sign up to.

Further exploration

The folks at the Niskanen Center, a libertarianish¹ think tank, have been at the forefront of promoting the synergy of capitalism and economic liberty with a system of comprehensive social insurance. See for example the following articles by Will Wilkinson:

• “For Trump and G.O.P., the welfare state shouldn’t be the enemy”
• “What if we can’t make government smaller?”
• “The freedom lover’s case for the welfare state”

See also the following:

• “The Administrative State vs. the Social Insurance State,” by Jason Brennan, a political philosopher and one of the founders of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog (motto: “free markets and social justice”).
• Country rankings for the Index of Economic Freedom produced by the Heritage Foundation.
• Statutory minimum wages in the EU 2017. A summary of minimum wage legislation in the European Union states, including Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. (Norway and Iceland are not included because they are not EU members.)
• “Labor law in Denmark.” A summary of employment-related government regulations in Denmark. In addition to no statutory minimum wage, note that there is “no legislative provision on what constitutes normal working hours,” “no legislation on public holidays,” and “[the] only rule is that an employee must be allowed one day of rest for every seven days.”

Finally, for the calculations and data behind the graph above and other statements in this post, see “Index of Economic Freedom Comparisons” and the source code for that article in the seven-answers code repository.

tl;dr: Is wealth inequality corrosive for democracy, and if so what then? It’s complicated . . .

In the previous post I promised to give my own answers to the “Seven Questions” posed by Jason Booms. So without further ado, here’s Jason’s first question:

Do you consider the increased concentration of economic wealth in the United States to be corrosive to our democracy? If yes, how should this issue be addressed? If not, why not?

My answer: First, I don’t consider wealth inequality in and of itself to be a bad thing. I think it’s problematic only to the extent that a) it coexists with a diminishment of the economic prospects of those people who are not wealthy, and b) it enables the wealthy to pursue political policies that further that diminishment (not necessarily intentionally, perhaps as a byproduct of policies that otherwise have some positive benefits).

Now, as it happens I think both of these things are true: Despite recent economic growth and a slow recovery from the Great Recession, we have not been living in times when all people have rising economic fortunes and prospects. Rather for some time now many if not most people have faced stagnant incomes and increasing economic uncertainty.

Technological progress and globalization have cushioned some of this, by providing cheaper and more capable goods and services and opening up new economic opportunities, but at the same time these trends have also had the opposite effect on putting pressure on the wages of workers exposed to them.

I’ll discuss in a future post a potential theoretical explanation of the social and political dynamics behind all this. For now suffice to say that those who have most benefited from the economy of the past few decades are strongly motivated to preserve their position, and are happy to leverage the political process to do so. (Again, as I noted above this need not be attributed to active malice. Often it’s a matter of conflating what might be good for oneself with what might be good for everyone else.)

Since elites in general have more political influence than others—not just due to wealth but also due to their favored position in the overall social/economic/political networks that drive political decisions—they’ve generally been successful in having their favored policies adopted, or at least in blocking the adoption of policies they don’t favor.

So what is to be done? One set of answers focuses on reducing the wealth of the extremely wealthy (for example through increased taxation) and reducing the effect of wealth on politics, for example through public financing of campaigns. I don’t think these are wrong answers exactly, but I don’t feel they address the roots of the problem.

Another set of answers focuses on addressing the trends that lead to people accumulating great wealth and with it great power over others. Some of these are not just about the extremely wealthy; they also address wealth inequality between the merely upper middle class and everyone below them.

(To get a little math-y for the moment, the general idea is that there are aspects of our society, economy, and polity that convert a Gaussian distribution of natural talents and learned skills—some with little, some with a lot, most in the middle—into a Pareto distribution of realized wealth and influence—20% of the people have 80% of the wealth, or even more unbalanced.)

So let’s take a quick look at some of the possible causes of and trends behind wealth inequality. I don’t have the time or the energy to do a complete treatment of these, so just consider this a list of “things to discuss”:

Technology and automation. This encompasses not just the typical “robots are coming for my jobs” concerns, but also technologies like the Internet that enable firms to grow to much larger scale while depending on a much smaller employee base.

This is an area where some of the biggest and splashiest new fortunes have been made (think Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.). Ease of distribution, near-zero marginal cost to serve additional customers, winner-take-all network effects, and global reach combine to produce massive rewards for those people and firms able through talent, luck, and other means to achieve dominance in their sectors.

Globalization. There’s no question that globalization on balance has been a boon to humanity, with increased trade lifting literal billions out of deep poverty in China, India, and elsewhere. However while the average worker’s income in traditionally poor countries has risen dramatically, the average worker in the US has benefited mainly through cheaper goods as opposed to increased salaries. On the other hand, high-end US workers benefit from being able to sell their talents into a larger marketplace.

Financialization. Besides technological innovation, another major driver of wealth extremes is increased financialization of the economy, in which more and more economic activity is in the form of financial transactions only indirectly related to the production of goods and services.

The consensus opinion seems to be that the underlying issue here is explicit and implicit (“too big to fail”) government subsidization of finance, ensuring that financial industries and the people who work in them can capture the upside while being protected against the downside (e.g., through bailouts).

Goverment-granted monopolies and subsidies. This covers a whole set of issues: excessive copyright terms, dubiously-granted patents, industry-specific subsidies both explicit and implicit (as discussed above with regard to financialization), and so on.

The preferred ways to address the distortions caused by great wealth will depending on what people think are the most important factors: for example, some advocate antitrust policy to address industry concentration in tech and finance, others advocate policies aimed specifically at reducing subsidies and artificial barriers to competition, and yet others have ideas on how to address the downsides of globalization.

There’s no shortage of interesting ideas, the problem is how to take effective political action to implement them: the fact of great wealth translating into great political power means that actions in opposition will face an uphill battle to succeed.

I don’t have any easy solutions for how to do it. I think to a large degree success will depend on “preparing the ground” for new policies (i.e., winnowing out the best ideas and figuring out how to effectively sell them), circumstances favorable to their adoption (e.g., another financial crisis for addressing excessive financialization), and straightforward political action and organizing to put things over the top. For reasons I go into in a future post, I am relatively pessimistic about things in the short term, but more optimistic in the long term.

For further exploration

Here are some cherry-picked articles covering the issues I discussed above. These are of course subject to my own interests, predispositions, and even browsing history. (I picked them in part by doing an Internet search for key terms like “technology” and “inequality.”) You’re welcome to propose sources of your own.

• “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016, 131(2): 519-578. An attempt to measure the relative shares of US wealth held by households over the period 1913 to 2012. The supplemental data for this paper are the source for the figure above.
• “You’re not imagining it: the rich really are hoarding economic growth,” by Dylan Matthews. A Vox article addressing various criticisms of measures of income inequality. (This includes, among other things, the criticism that measuring income and wealth by household instead of by individual is misleading given changes in family structure among lower-income people—a criticism that could be levied against the figure I reproduce above).
• “Technology and inequality.” From the MIT Technology Review, this is a representative example of the many articles written about the role of technological innovations in increasing inequality, with guest appearances by various prominent economists, including Thomas Piketty, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, David Autor and Daron Acemoglu, and Robert Solow.
• “It’s time to think for yourself on free trade.” A Foreign Policy article by economist Dani Rodrik outlining his concerns about globalization, free trade, and “social dumping.”
• “‘Financialization’ as a cause of economic malaise.” A New York Times opinion piece by former Reagan/Bush advisor Bruce Bartlett summarizing the concerns of various economists about the role of finance in the US economy.
• “Freeing the captured economy.” A series of articles from the Cato Institute journal Cato Unbound discussing the arguments in the book The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles.

In the introduction to a planned loosely-connected series of posts, I wrote that I wanted to look at the long-term trends and themes that may drive politics in the 21st century. I’ve been having trouble getting started on writing, but finally got pushed out of my procrastination by the January post “Seven Questions” by local political blogger Jason Booms.

Jason writes:

With the Maryland filing deadline fast approaching for those who are (or are considering) seeking public office in the 2018 election cycle (February 27, 2018 to be precise), this blog is once again considering what questionnaires (if any) to send out to various campaigns. . . .

While we can discuss specific policy proposals all day long ($15/hr federal minimum wage, Medicare for All, etc. . . .), I like to return to exploring “first principles” to understand how candidates think about underlying issues.

This is a pretty interesting approach to try to take candidates out of the “talking points” mode of political campaigning. Some candidates have already taken Jason up on his offer, beginning with some candidates for District 12 of the Maryland House of Delegates.

I thought it would be fun to supply my own answers to his questions, even though I’m not running for anything. I’ll do one question and answer per post, and will update the following list as I publish new posts:

1. Wealth inequality
2. Social democracy (plus a bonus fun post “If-by-socialism”)
3. Racial equality
4. Liberty and equality (and baseball!)
5. Class warfare
6. Gender equality
7. LGBTQIA equality

These posts will be primarily “think pieces,” but I may offer some actual policy suggestions here and there.

Addendum

I’m not 100% sure what Jason would consider to be acceptable answers to these questions (although his subsequent posts offer some guidance). Certainly some if not most of them I’d consider to be leading questions, in the sense that Jason is apparently trying to suss out who best matches his particular vision of progressive politics.

I doubt very much that I myself would pass Jason’s litmus test (to the extent he has one), but I think these are questions to be taken seriously. I’ll try to answer them honestly and to the best of my ability. I’m still thinking through a lot of these issues and doing ongoing reading and research, so a lot of my comments represent “work in progress” and “thinking out loud”. I reserve the right to change my mind on some points in the future. (As I said, I’m not a candidate for anything.)

Finally, I’ll remind everyone once again that I am a registered Democrat and have been all my life. However, I’ll try to be as non-partisan as possible, in the hope that these posts may be of interest to you no matter your political affiliation.

If you’re like me you may be tired of reading (or participating in!) Twitter tiffs and Facebook free-for-alls about political issues, but not necessarily tired of thinking about the future of Howard County, Maryland, the United States, and the world. If so, I invite you to take a break from social media and speculate with me about the long-term trends and themes that may drive politics in the 21st century:

How long might our current period of political conflict last? What political ideas and arguments might gain traction in the coming years and decades? What about the political implications of social and technological changes and other “macro-trends”? I very much doubt that my readers will agree with everything I write, but at least I hope that I can say something interesting that can’t be captured in 140 characters.

Unlike my previous series on the Chrysalis and Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, I don’t have a list of posts planned out ahead of time, although there are particular ideas and themes I definitely plan to touch on. However I can at least sketch out what I intend this series to be (or not be):

• Non-partisan. Although I am a life-long registered Democrat, I am going to try to write in a way that is fair and civil to people of different political parties and persuasions. (If you think I’ve failed in that aim, see the sidebar for where to send complaints.)

• Non-current. No commentary on current events—whether today’s, this week’s, this month’s, or even the next four years’—and no comments about anyone currently holding or seeking to hold political office.

• Non-local. Although I’m writing from a Howard County perspective for a Howard County audience, I’ll typically focus on politics at a national level (mostly the US).

• (Mostly) non-technical. Long-time readers know that I love to throw in mathematical, statistical, scientific, and technological material from time to time. (See for example my past posts on income inequality and maps of election results.) I’ll try to curb that tendency but won’t be able to avoid it entirely, because science and technology will likely play a significant role in the politics of the future.

Although my intent is to be non-partisan, it would be stupid to deny that I have particular opinions and interests that influence what I think about political issues. Here’s the perspective from which I’ll be writing:

• I am skeptical of attempts to justify particular political systems based on pure deductive reasoning and/or unrealistic ideas about human nature. I am partial to ideas that take into account what we know (or can reasonably conclude) about people, the societies they live in, the culture and institutions they create, and the history of the world.

• I tend to judge political systems by how well they improve the lives of people as individuals, including in particular individuals marginalized within their societies. I am skeptical of those who think political systems exist primarily to serve one’s family, ethnic group, nation, or God.

• I don’t believe that political philosophy is a search for truth (for example, what types of political, economic, and social arrangements are provably most just). I believe it is a search for plausible and persuasive arguments in favor of our own ideas and feelings about how society should be organized. I also believe that—if approached correctly—that is not necessarily a bad thing.

So, that’s what I’ll be writing about in the coming months. Apropos of my last point above, for my next post I’ll talk about how political philosophy is (or should be) like selling, only with a really long sales cycle.

tl;dr: The map of Howard County looks very different if you’re looking for votes. Cartograms help you see like a politician.

There are 118 election precincts in Howard County, Maryland, varying both in geographic area and in the number of voters they contain. Precincts in western Howard County tend to be larger, because the population density in western Howard is lower. Precincts in more densely populated areas of the county (including Columbia) tend to be smaller. If we’re interested in how voters behave across the county a conventional map can be misleading because the larger area of western Howard precincts causes us to overrate the importance and impact of those precincts. (This is similar to the US electoral map being visually dominated by large states like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas that have fewer voters than small states like Connecticut and Rhode Island.)

The figure above is actually a map of Howard County electoral precincts, not as they exist in reality but as they might appear if their size were proportional to the number of voters they contain. More specifically, this is a cartogram in which the precinct map is distorted to make precinct areas proportional to the number of registered voters in each precinct as of the 2014 general election.

Let’s look at a real-life example of how cartograms can present a more accurate picture of election results. The next map shows Republican Allan Kittleman’s election-day margin of victory in each precinct in his 2014 race for Howard County Executive against Democrat Courtney Watson. (The margin of victory is expressed as votes per precinct, not as a percentage. Thus a value of 100 means that Kittleman received 100 more votes in a precinct on election day than Watson. The map does not include absentee and early voting results because they are not reported per precinct.)

Each precinct is colored from bright red (large Kittleman margin) to bright blue (large Watson margin) and all shades in between. (Incidentally, this type of colored map is known as a choropleth map.) Since precincts in western Howard County are both large and heavily Republican the conventional map exaggerates the extent of Kittleman’s election-day victory margin over Watson.

To address this perceptual problem we can instead represent the exact same data in the form of a cartogram, as seen in the next map. Here the precincts of western Howard shrink in size to reflect their true contribution to the overall registered voter population. In particular Howard County Council District 5 now appears to be roughly equal in size to the other districts—which makes sense since county council redistricting had as one of its goals making the districts contain roughly equal number of voters. On this map Kittleman’s margin of victory still appears to be significant, but we can better identify precincts (like those in Columbia) in which Watson polled strongly on election day.

Cartograms can be used in place of conventional maps in any context in which each geographic subdivision has associated with it some common variable of interest. For example, suppose we want to look at elementary school overcrowding in Howard County. Looking at a conventional map (like the elementary school attendance area map provided by the Howard County Public School System) we might say, “Gee, there are a lot of elementary schools in eastern Howard. How could they possibly be overcrowded?” It would make much more sense to show school attendance areas as a cartogram in which the size of each attendance area was proportional to the number of students in that area. Each of the attendance areas could then be colored according to the extent of overcrowding at that school.

This sounds like a possible future project for me if and when I have time. Or if anyone out there would like to try this yourself, I’ve provided more detailed information on how to create maps like those shown above. See my three-part series “Creating Howard County Precinct Cartograms Based on 2014 Registered Voters” (part 1, part 2, and part 3) and my second three-part series “Allan Kittleman’s Election-Day Victory Margins in the Howard County 2014 General Election” (part 1, part 2, and part 3).

In the coming days and weeks I’ll be posting some analyses of Howard County election results. Unfortunately the data released by the Howard County Board of Elections and the Maryland State Board of Elections is not always in the most useful form for analysis. In particular I was looking for per-precinct turnout statistics for the 2014 general election in Howard County, along with some way to match up precincts with the county council district of which they’re a part. That data is available in the 2014 general election results per precinct/district published by the Howard County Board of Elections, but unfortunately that document is a PDF document.

PDF files are great for reading by humans, but lousy for reading by machines. They violate guideline 8 in the Open Data Policy Guidelines published by the Sunlight Foundation:

For maximal access, data must be released in formats that lend themselves to easy and efficient reuse via technology. … This means releasing information in open formats (or “open standards”), in machine-readable formats, that are structured (or machine-processable) appropriately. … While formats such as HTML and PDF are easily opened for most computer users, these formats are difficult to convert the information to new uses.

Since the data I wanted wasn’t in a format I could use, I manually extracted the data from the PDF document and converted it into a useful format (Comma Separated Value or CSV format) myself. Then since someone else might find a use for them, I published the files online in a datasets area of my Github hocodata repository. The first two files are as follows:

• hocomd-2014-precinct-council.csv. This dataset maps the 118 Howard County election precincts to the county council districts in which those precincts are included.
• hocomd-2014-general-election-turnout.csv. This dataset contains turnout statistics for each of the 118 Howard County precincts in the 2014 general election, including the number of registered voters and ballots cast in each precinct on election day.

Stay tuned for some interesting ways to use this data.

Walter Carson (wcarson@columbiaunion.net) - 2015-03-01 14:38

Thank you. As always, of interest. How might such data be used to look at the state legislative districts, if at all? Best wishes. WEC Sent from my iPhone

hecker - 2015-03-01 19:50

See my future posts for some ideas on how this data might be used. Probably the first thing I’ll do is look at different county council districts to see if there seems to be any real difference in 2014 general election turnout between the districts. A similar analysis could be done for legislative districts, or at least those portions of the districts within Howard County. (A more complete analysis would need data from Carroll County, Baltimore County, etc.)

Dear Tom,

True to your nature, I see you’ve already blogged about the election results yesterday and given us your thoughts on what was a hard-fought but ultimately unsuccessful effort in District 9B. I can’t let your post go without one of my own. I don’t for a moment regret my endorsement of you, and in particular I don’t regret the investment I made in your campaign through my donations. I felt they were an excellent investment in a campaign that by all indications was professionally run, focused on issues that matter to the people of Ellicott City, positive in all its aspects, and (most important) featured a candidate who was tireless in reaching out to his potential constituents, listening to their opinions, and promoting a practical vision for governing.

Please pardon me while I go a bit meta (in my usual way): As you may or may not know, a lot of libertarians and conservatives are enamored of public choice theory and its use of economic theories to explain why politicians behave as they do. Which is fine as far as it goes, but they often go on to use this as a stick with which to beat advocates of government action, claiming that public choice theory conclusively proves that all politicians are motivated only by their own self-interest, and thus can never and will never act so as to promote the public good. This, to be frank, is a crock of crap. It’s simply the flip side of the argument many progressives make, that market failures prove that capitalism doesn’t work as advertised, and ultimately is nothing but selfishness and greed incarnate.

What is true is that both democracy and capitalism work best when practiced by people whose personalities and experiences predispose them to have concerns for others beyond themselves and their “tribes.” Motivated in many ways by self-interest they may be (who would ever run for public office without a fair amount of ambition to provide a spur?), but there are lots of politicians (of all parties) who clearly are moved by a sense of civic duty and genuinely seek to improve the well-being of their constituents (just as there are many businesspeople for whom money is not the be-all and end-all, and who genuinely seek to improve the well-being of their customers). We in Howard County are blessed to have more than our fair share of such politicians, of whom you are one. I appreciate all that you have done for this county thus far, and look forward to seeing the fruits of whatever civic activities you may choose to undertake in the future. Thank you again, and the best of luck in your post-campaign life.

Your supporter and fellow blogger,

Frank

Jessie Newburn - 2014-11-05 16:18

Amen!

Among their other policy proposals, both candidates for Howard County Executive have proposed new initiatives to make data about the workings of county government more available to residents. Allan Kittleman has promoted what he calls “HoCoStat,” a “platform to hold government accountable” that “will link data to long-term impacts” and “measure . . . response and process times for various government functions.” Courtney Watson’s corresponding initiative doesn’t have a catchy name, but her “open government” vision includes a promise to “leverage technology to improve and maintain government transparency, efficiency and communication” by creating “an intuitive and interactive web portal that provides public access to information in usable and searchable formats.”

As someone who’s written my share of data-heavy blog posts you might expect that I’d be wildly cheering these plans on from the sidelines. However as someone who’s also seen my share of technology hype cycles, of which “big data” is only the latest, I also feel compelled to throw a little cold water on at least some aspects of these proposals. To be specific:

Yes, open government, big data, and related topics are hot and sexy. But in the end the goal of Howard County government is to making Howard County a better place to live for its residents. In that respect providing access to government data (and in particular building high-profile web portals, dashboards, and so on, to display that data) is a means, not an end. This applies more generally to accountability, transparency, and all those other nice things candidates are promising and activists are demanding. We shouldn’t confuse process with products: Transparency is nice, but transparency in and of itself is arguably useless.

Second, as James Howard noted in a recent post, Howard County isn’t really big enough for big data. To take but one example, systems like those created in New York City, Baltimore, and so on, are often touted as enabling better law enforcement, for example by identifying detailed geographic patterns in particular types of crimes. But those large cities have lots of crimes, enough that any patterns in the data stand a good chance of being significant. Given the generally small number of crimes in Howard County, it’s quite possible that a lot of the patterns in county crime data simply represent statistical noise and don’t add a lot of information beyond what Howard County police already know based on their lived experience. That’s certainly true for very low-frequency crimes like murder. In 2013 there were only four homicides in Howard County, and I personally knew three of the victims. Is there any significance to that fact? None whatsoever—it’s simply random coincidence at work.

Next, data without context is not that useful, and may be actively harmful. A good example is school test scores. As Julia McCready recently pointed out, it’s unclear that school test scores are actually useful for identifying “good” schools versus “bad” schools. It’s quite possible that test scores for a given school are simply reflecting the characteristics of the students who go to that school, and not whether that school is better than others in educating students. A system that doesn’t provide context for data is a system whose data is likely to be misinterpreted and misused.

Related to the previous point, data without (policy) experimentation is also not all that useful. Data in and of itself isn’t necessarily that informative about what policies should be implemented, because it doesn’t necessarily indicate which underlying factors are driving the results we see, and how we migh achieve better results. Determining that typically requires actually making some policy changes to see what happens, and doing so in a controlled manner that permits some statistically valid conclusions to be drawn. (See for example Jim Manzi’s book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society.) But making policy changes is hard enough in the first place; doing randomized controlled trials of different policy options (especially when one option in a proper trial is “do nothing”) is even more difficult. (It’s the same phenomenon as with drug trials: No one wants to be in the group taking the placebo.)

Finally, all the data in the world won’t necessarily change people’s minds about what policies to adopt. People of all political persuasions are quite capable of holding on to their opinions and political positions no matter what the data indicates (and note that I myself can be as susceptible to this as anyone). Smart people in particular (the kind of people who like to visit data portals and are arguing for their creation) are really good at finding reasons to doubt what the data appears to be telling us. So if in the end we switch from arguing about policies to arguing about data and methodologies, have we really achieved anything?

Despite all I’ve written above I’m not a total skeptic about the possibility of Howard County doing more to provide access to government data. I’d just like the county government and in particular the new County Executive to embark on this task with a proper sense of humility. In particular I have the following recommendations:

First, start simple, start small, underpromise and over deliver. Do we really need to spend potentially millions of taxpayer dollars on a high-profile system that’s at a relatively high risk of failing to meet its goals? Why not incrementally extend existing efforts? For example, there’s already a site data.howardcountymd.gov. Does anyone use it? If not, why not? Could this site be relatively inexpensively improved to make it more valuable and attractive to Howard County residents? Could data already provided by other county agencies be consolidated onto this existing site?

Next, for many if not most cases I suggest that the county provide only data, and let the private and nonprofit sector add value to it. A lot of the data generated by Howard County government is of interest to relatively small groups of people. Why bother spending a lot of time and money creating a fancy data portal just for those groups? Just give them the raw data, in as simple a form as possible, for example as so-called “comma-separated values” or CSV-formatted files that can be loaded into any desktop spreadsheet program or open source statistical package. Then let those groups decide how best to analyze the data and prepare it for public dissemination. If the county wants to do more, “teach people to fish”: work with the Howard County Library System, Howard Community College, and local volunteers to organize classes for businesses, nonprofit organizations, and local activists in how to use common “data science” tools and how to build data-driven web sites.

If the county does want to provide its own system, please, please, please don’t do so under an arrangement that gives an outside contractor a measure of control over the data, how it’s distributed, and what can be done with it. If the county releases data then that data should be available to everyone, in a form everyone can use, and for whatever purposes people want to make use of it.

Related to the previous point, treat providing data to the public as a core government function, to be budgeted as such, and not as an adjunct task for which an agency needs to pursue “cost recovery” or even (heaven forbid) tries to make a profit center. It is not the business of government to be “in business,” especially in an era when the marginal cost of disseminating raw data products via the Internet is so low. Budget for collecting the data and preparing it for public release at no charge, not for implementing complicated schemes by which access to data can be controlled and sold.

Government data ultimately belongs to all of us, a public resource for all to use, and government itself is not necessarily best equipped to analyze, present, and build on that data. Let’s have Howard County government data be made available to all in a way that makes the most efficient use of taxpayer dollars and leverages the creative energies of the multitude of organizations and individuals in the private and civic sectors. I think that’s an approach that anyone can get behind, no matter their political affiliation.

Jessie Newburn - 2014-11-04 12:55

Ever and always, brilliant!

Trevor Greene (trevordentist@gmail.com) - 2014-11-04 14:01

I can think of one good reason to put all this data out there. Once all the data is readily available, I’ll be able to read a series of Frank Hecker blog posts analyzing said data.

hecker - 2014-11-06 17:34

Trevor, good to see your comments again. But… I don’t think Howard County government needs to spend millions just to keep me happy and you entertained :-)

Before I publish my main post for today, a brief public service announcement: If you live in District 9B and haven’t yet voted, please consider giving Tom Coale your vote for Delegate. For the most part this is a nonpartisan blog, and I have a pretty strict policy of not endorsing candidates for office, even for nonpartisan positions like those on the Board of Education. The only exception I’ve ever made (and likely ever will make) is for Tom. I think he would make a great representative for the people of Ellicott City; my only regret is that I live across US 40 from District 9B and can’t vote for him. (Although if Tom wins this election and performs at the level I think he’s capable of, I think in future I and a lot of other people will in fact get our chance to elect him to something else.)

• Howard County
  • County Executive
  • Council District 1
  • Sheriff
  • State’s Attorney
  • Judge of the Orphans’ Court
  • Board of Education
• Maryland State Senate
  • District 9
  • Districts 12 and 13
• Maryland House of Delegates
  • District 9A
  • District 9B
  • District 12
  • District 13

Note that I’ve updated the Board of Education and House of Delegates District 12 posts to add pictures of signs for Allen Dyer and Eric Ebersole respectively.

I already selected winners (or in some cases, multiple winners) for signs in each race. Now it’s time for me to name winners in some special category, as well as an overall winner for all signs I saw.

The first category is for the best slogan. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not too hot on including campaign slogans on signs, and certainly there were a number of signs in this election where the slogan wasn’t doing much more than taking up space. However on Frank Mirabile’s sign the slogan “Time to Stand Our Ground” is both memorable and does something useful, namely letting the more partisan voters in a party primary know exactly where the candidate, uh, stands.

After seeing lots of signs I get tired of looking at conventional color schemes, either the American colors red, white, and blue or the Maryland colors red, white, black, and yellow, and I yearn for a change. I thus decided to have a “color my world” category, in which the winner is the large Nick Stewart sign and its orange on blue color scheme.

Some signs I thought were almost but not quite what they could be. In some cases (as, for example, with Ryan Frederic’s sign) I don’t know enough about graphic design to determine how the sign could best be improved. In other cases I thought just a relatively small change would do the trick. Hence we have the “most easily improved” category, with the winner being the small Warren Miller sign once the (in my opinion) superfluous design elements in the upper left and right corners have been removed (as I’ve done here).

Finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for (or not, as the case may be): My pick for the best Howard County campaign sign of 2014. Those of you who’ve been reading this entire series will not be surprised at my pick, the large Dario Broccolino sign. This sign made me go “wow” the first time I saw it, and I haven’t seen another sign to top it since then.

With that I’m concluding this series, at least for now. I did collect pictures of signs for the gubernatorial race and the race for Attorney General, but I just ran out of energy to post and critique them; maybe later. Also, if I have time and the inclination I’ll post closer to the general election if there are any new signs that didn’t show up in the primary.

Finally, some thanks: First, thanks to all of you who’ve come to this blog to read these posts; I appreciate your attention, and hope your time was worth it. A further thanks to those of you who stopped to comment, who sent me pictures of signs, or who pointed out where I could find them; I love hearing from readers, and thank you for taking the time to contact me. And last but not at all least, thanks to all the candidates who put themselves out in the public eye and ran for election to public office. As I wrote before, you had to endure people commenting on your public appearances, counting up your Twitter and Facebook followers, and making videos about your direct mail pieces. And thanks to me, not even your signs are safe from criticism. Thank you for bearing it all in good grace, and being willing to serve the citizens of Howard County and Maryland.

This is the end of my one-a-day posts; I now return you to your regular (or I should say in my case, irregular) programming. I’m not sure when I’ll post next, or what I’ll post about, but if you’re interested in what more I might have to say please take a moment to click the “Subscribe via email” button or add my RSS feed to your newsreader. Till later!

Walter Carson (wcarson@columbiaunion.net) - 2014-06-25 12:18

Well done! Always enjoy your take on signs and local politics. Best wishes. WEC Sent from my iPhone

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed.

I’ve previously written about the problems inherent in using all four colors of the Maryland flag in a single sign. This sign handles those problems as well as they can be handled, mainly by avoiding the red text on yellow background found in signs from Trent Kittleman, Frank Mirabile, and others. Instead this sign carefully restricts itself to the exact color juxtapositions found the Maryland flag: black with yellow, and red with white. More specifically, it restricts itself to what I think are the best color combinations: black text on a yellow background and white text on a red background.

Some other things to note about this sign: The typeface is clean and readable; it’s bold enough to stand out but light enough to allow adequate space between the letters. Using both upper and lower case in “Kittleman” means that the text isn’t quite as wide as it would be if it were in all upper case, and thus it can fit better on the sign. (“Kittleman” has nine letters, just like “Grabowski” and “Markovitz”; compare this sign to the Grabowski and Markovitz signs I discussed in my previous post.) The red banner-like design element in the upper right corner is well-done; note that on the left side of the element the yellow background seems to form an arrowhead pointing to the “Proven Independent Leader” slogan. The slogan itself points diagonally upward to the right to make the sign more dynamic (the same technique used on the Dario Broccolino sign). Finally, note that the horizontal line separating “Kittleman” from “Howard County Executive” is not just red on yellow (a poor combination) but is both red and white in order to maintain the preferred color juxtapositions I mentioned above.

The one thing that bothered me about this sign is that the “Howard County Executive” seems a bit thin. When I was walking around the neighborhood I had some trouble making that text out when viewing the sign from a distance.

The design of the large version of the Allan Kittleman sign is the same as that of the smaller sign, except that “Howard County Executive” is now one line rather than two, is in a slightly bolder typeface, and (at least to my eyes) is more readable.

Like Courtney Watson’s 2010 sign, this sign uses white text on a blue background to good effect: The text is very readable (especially “County Executive”), and there’s a good visual progression from oblique serif type and all caps in “COURTNEY” to the bold san serif typeface of “WATSON” to the sans serif mixed case of “County Executive.”

The one potentially problematic part of this sign is the design element in the upper left corner. Typical non-text elements in signs are either totally non-representational (e.g., lines or borders) or are common symbols that are immediately recognizable (e.g., stars, apples, flag-derived banners). This element is clearly intended to represent something, but it’s not immediately clear what that something is. My personal interpretation is that it’s symbolic of Howard County’s rural heritage: (yellow) sun above (white) road above (green) field; however I’m not sure the average person would see it the same way as I do. Nevertheless the colors are very nice and brighten up what would otherwise be a plain and unadorned sign. (Note also that subtle green line that separates “WATSON” and “County Executive” and echoes the green in the upper left conner.)

Now for the tough part: Which sign to vote for? This contest is certainly not as lopsided as we saw four years ago with Trent Kittleman’s sign vs. Ken Ulman’s sign; these signs are much more closely matched. Both sign designs are professional and effective but neither is perfect, for reasons explained above. On Kittleman’s side I think this the first black/yellow/red/white sign design I actually find attractive; on Watson’s side I really like the sign but consider it just a step down from the 2010 sign. In the end I’m going to take the coward’s way out and call this a toss-up.

This concludes my look at the campaign signs for Howard County local races in 2014. In my next post I’ll wrap things up and name some overall winners in various categories, including my choice for the best Howard County campaign sign of 2014.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Note that I could not find any signs for David Blake Melton.

Dave Grabowski, like Lisa Markovitz and Dario Broccolino, has the problem of having a long name that’s difficult to fit on a sign; unlike Renée McGuirk-Spence, hyphenating it is not an option. Unlike the Dario Broccolino sign, which provided more room for the name by displaying it on the diagonal, this Grabowski sign adopts the simple strategy of displaying the name horizontally in a serif typeface that is pretty readable. Overall the sign is clean and well-designed, with no extraneous elements or slogans. The background color isn’t one of my favorites, but that’s just a matter of taste; certainly it provides a good contrast to the text.

I like the color on this sign; it’s a change from the typical colors and is not so pastel that it causes contrast problems. However I think the typeface used for “Markovitz” is just a tad too bold, and that does affect readability a bit. Compare this sign to the Grabowski sign above; both names are the same length but I think you’d better be able to recognize “Grabowski” from a distance. Also, I’m not sure the “Vote ‘14” design element in the upper right corner adds anything.

This is a solid sign: No extraneous clutter, typeface that’s bold but still readable, and a good background color.

This is almost the same design as the small Wendy Royalty sign, but it’s missing the white border found on that sign. To me that’s to its detriment: I think the white border works well to frame the main part of the design. Without the border all that red in the background gets to be a bit much. The design is cropped really tight as well; notice how close the “R” and “y” in “Royalty” are to the edge of the sign.

A nice minimal sign that highlights the candidate’s (full) name and position sought without trying to cram anything else in. The color and typeface look good as well.

This is an interesting sign. Kevin Forrest Schmidt couples this sign with his regular sign, for example putting the “RUN FORREST RUN” sign next to or in front of his other sign. It’s a cute gimmick to lend some personality to the signs, although I’m not sure if it’s worth printing double the number of signs that normally would be required.

Jon Weinstein likes yellow and white text on blue backgrounds; his 2010 campaign signs used the same color scheme. This one is interesting because it’s a variant of the design on his other small sign. I don’t really like the stars intermixed with dots; it seems a bit busy. However I do like the typefaces on this sign.

The different typeface and the switch to mixed upper and lower case on “Weinstein” make this sign a bit more legible. However I think the typeface on this sign is a bit lacking in personality compared to the previous sign.

This sign is just a taller version of the small sign, with “Howard County Council” spread out over three lines to add height. I think that’s a mistake, as it makes the design look too skinny. I think it would have been better to drop the “Howard,” put “County Council” on one line, and reduce the height just a tad.

Which sign should go on to the general election? There are no clunkers in this race, but overall I think I like the small Wendy Royalty sign the best. However the large Wendy Royalty sign serves as a warning that a good design can be significantly compromised by seemingly minor changes (in this case removing the border and cropping more tightly).

In my next post I’ll look at the marquee Howard County race, and the last local race for which I was able to find signs, namely the contest for Howard County Executive.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Thanks to Corey Andrews for sending in a picture of his sign. I couldn’t find any signs for Zaneb Beams and Dan Furman. I did see one sign for Allen Dyer, but couldn’t stop to take a picture; by the time I came back later that day the sign was gone.

This is a good minimal sign with a nice clean typeface and a dark blue background to provide excellent contrast and legibility.

The core of this sign is good: Nice typeface, readable, stands out. However the top and bottom of this sign succumb to the syndrome of treating a campaign sign like a direct mail piece.

This is a well-designed sign as far as it goes: The typeface is great, the candidate’s name is prominently featured (even though it takes most of the sign to do so), and the apple design element is really well-done. Unfortunately the pastel color scheme just doesn’t work well in the great outdoors; it gets washed out in bright sunlight and the sign becomes difficult to read.

I don’t understand why this sign uses an American flag; it’s a Board of Education race, not a national election. Other than that the text elements are OK as far as they go—but note that ditching the flag motif would have allowed splitting the candidate’s name onto two lines and making the text significantly larger.

A nice sign. The main typeface used for “BUTLER” stands out well, and the other typeface complements it well. (Note that the typeface used for “Olga” is an oblique version of that used for “Board of Education.” The thin white line above “Board of Education” is a nice touch too; it breaks up what otherwise might be a too-heavy red background.

A good solid sign that’s quite readable. The red, white, and blue color scheme, though quite attractive, doesn’t exactly say “Board of Education” to me.

The background apple makes the “CH” in “FRENCH” almost unreadable on this sign from a distance. Also, why “Return” and not “Re-Elect”? Because it sounds more “nonpartisan”?

As I’ve mentioned previously, apples are a cliché in the context of Board of Education campaign signs. The strategy of this sign is that if you’re going to use a cliché, own the cliché. That together with minimal text and good complementary typefaces makes for a good sign. My only nitpick is with the stars in the upper right, which make that area of the sign look a bit busy.

The sun adds visual interest to this sign, its yellow color complements the green background and text colors, and the childish look of the drawing evokes education without resorting to the usual clichés.

My daughter writes: “An awesome sign. The bow-tie makes it look totes adorbs! Even though they are soooo 2012, it’s still a nice touch.” I write: Why a (trademarked!) bow-tie that’s inspired by the Maryland flag? Apparently because Mike Smith wears one; see for example this Baltimore Sun story. I guess it’s a change from the usual apples, but to be honest I’ve been looking at this sign for over a month now and just now cracked the code on it. (For a while I wasn’t sure it was even supposed to be a bow-tie.) In any case, whether the bow-tie is a good idea or not, including it in the middle of the sign means that the candidate’s name is relegated to a small space at the top of the sign. That’s definitely not a good idea in my book.

This sign goes heavy on the apples, but oddly enough where one might expect to find yet another one, i.e., replacing the “o” in Vaillancourt, instead there’s a large globe and three small children. This is another sign where I had to puzzle out what was going on: The globe isn’t that visible from a distance, so you have to get up close to see what’s going on. Again, this might be OK on a direct mail piece, but with a sign the viewer will likely be driving by at 20 mph or more and there’s not enough time to notice and interpret sign elements that aren’t boldly drawn.

This is a tough race to call an overall sign winner. The Olga Butler sign had no missteps, but it also didn’t have anything in the design that specifically evoked a Board of Education race; ditto for the Allen Dyer sign. The Leslie Kornreich sign did do that effectively, and was definitely the best of the “apple signs”; the Christine O’Connor offered an alternative way to evoke education and childhood that I thought worked well. Finally, the underlying design of the Maureen Evans Arthurs sign was really excellent, and if the colors had been a bit bolder I would have likely named it the winner.

In my next post I’ll look at the signs for candidates in the Howard County Council race in District 1.

UPDATE: Corrected the number of candidates going on to the general election; thanks go to Corey Andrews for the correction.

UPDATE 2: Finally found a sign for Allen Dyer and updated the post to add it.

Urban Bushwoman - 2014-06-23 02:31

I like the Smith sign. :)

hecker - 2014-06-23 03:50

Thanks for stopping by to comment! Once I figured out the bow-tie thing, I think it was a clever gimmick for personal branding. But I still think the name is too small…

Corey Andrews (cacoreya@yahoo.com) - 2014-06-23 16:19

Good post. One thing to note… eight candidates will make it through the primary, not four.

hecker - 2014-06-23 17:25

D’oh! I was confusing the number of open seats with the number of people going on to the general. Thanks for catching this! I’ve updated the post.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Note that I couldn’t find any signs for Jody Venkatesan.

Hey, haven’t I seen this sign before? Yes, it’s Team 13 once again, with Guy Guzzone apparently not having any signs just for himself. As I wrote before, this sign is effective but otherwise lacks interest.

Another sign we’ve seen before, as Ed Kasemeyer piggybacks on Terri Hill’s sign design. Again I’ve noted the problems I have with this sign, including the somewhat overly idiosyncratic typeface and the botched banner.

A simple sign that gets straight to the point and drives it home without any missteps along the way: candidate’s last name, position sought, and web site address for those wanting to know more.

The final tally? I’m going to give this one to Jesse Pippy, first for actually having a sign of his own and second for having it be a simple but nice one.

In my next post I’ll come back to Howard County local races and evaluate signs for the Board of Education candidates.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed.

This is a good sign, especially for using only two colors. The “BATES” is large and readable in a clear serif typeface, and the smaller “Gail” in a script typeface adds a nice informal, almost personal, note. The integration of the Maryland flag-inspired banner is also done very well; note that the banner is outlined to prevent confusion between the sign background and the white parts of the banner.

This sign does some things quite well, and one thing not so well. The good news: The sans serif typeface used for “FREDERIC” is bold and readable; it really sells the sign. The serif typeface used for the smaller “RYAN” is also a good choice and complements the main typeface well; having the “R” be slightly larger than the “YAN” is also a nice touch. Finally, the red star to the right of “RYAN” both balances the composition and makes it more dynamic—note that the star is slightly off-center to the right, which adds visual interest. Overall, it’s an uncluttered and powerful design.

Now for the bad news: Printing “STATE SENATOR” and “DISTRICT 9” in red ink on a dark blue background makes them almost unreadable, particular if you’re driving by rather than walking.

The main thing I don’t like about this sign is the “VOTE DANIEL” banner at the top. It looks just a tad odd, and I feel like it’s undersized relative to the rest of the sign. Otherwise the sign is competent and unexceptionable.

The results: This sign contest is a good example of “might have been.” The Ryan Frederic sign design is really strong, but I think it was sabotaged by the color choice on the lower text. I understand the desire to echo the red star at the top of the sign with red at the bottom of the sign and thus tie the thole design together. However ultimately this is a campaign sign, not a print ad or direct mail piece, and I think a campaign sign has to meet more stringent criteria for readability than designs in other media. This stumble on the part of the Ryan Frederic sign opens the way up for the Gail Bates sign to claim victory.

In my next post I’ll evaluate signs for State Senate candidates in District 12 and 13.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate , along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. (I’m doing Team 13 first because “Atterbeary” starts with an “A.” Also, I couldn’t find signs for Eaton and Yates.)

The Team 13 sign seems to be a repeat of its sign from 2010 (from what I can recall). Is it effective? Yes: The sign reinforces that this is a slate, and tells you who’s part of it. Is it attractive? Only if you like bare-vanilla minimalism. I will say though that I think in some ways doing red text on a white background is superior to doing white text on a red background.

Another basic sign that gets the job done but doesn’t hold much interest from a design perspective.

I like the orange background color on this, as well as the white outlining around the black letters in “SIDDIQUI,” which makes the name stand out nicely. This sign also has three more subtle characteristics: First, and most trivial, the orange background and black text with white outline remind one of the Baltimore Orioles (for example, this version of their uniform); if this isn’t simply a coincidence then it’s certainly appropriate for a candidate running in the Baltimore suburbs, especially in a district that also takes in part of Baltimore County.

Second, omitting the first name means that this sign could have been used equally well by either Nayab Siddiqui or Janet Siddiqui, prior to the “great switcheroo” that saw Janet withdraw from the District 13 race at the last minute and be replaced by Nayab. (Of course, if either Janet or Nayab Siddiqui had been accepted into Team 13 then presumably they would have been on the standard Team 13 signs and if they wanted to they could have saved money and not done their own signs.) And in any case it allows Nayab to get the benefit of any positive feelings people have toward Janet.

Finally, if I recall correctly, on every other sign I’ve seen for House of Delegates races the word “Delegate” appears on the bottom of the sign, below the candidate’s name. On Nayab Siddiqui’s sign, and only on his sign, it appears at the top, so that a casual observer would read the sign as “Delegate Siddiqui.” (The word “For” appears at the beginning, but it’s in fairly small letters and is east to miss.) Again, this may be a coincidence, just based on the way the design evolved, but it can also be read as a way to compensate for being left off of Team 13: Encourage less-informed voters to think that you’ve already been elected and are running as an incumbent.

Another basic sign that gets the job done. I don’t like the way the white stripe at the bottom transitions into the Maryland flag-based banner, but that may just be me being picky.

As with District 12 it’s not difficult to pick a winner here. If nothing else Nayab Siddiqui’s sign evinces an attempt to put some thought into the sign’s design above and beyond the minimum required, and it also has fun subliminal cleverness whether intended or not.

In my next post I’ll evaluate signs for Maryland State Senate candidates in District 9.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. I couldn’t find signs for Jay Fred Cohen, Adam Sachs, or Rick Martel.

The state of Maryland seems strangely balanced on the “Y” in “BAILEY” in this sign. I think it might have been better to reduce the size of the image slightly, or just ditch the map of Maryland entirely and use something else. (The crooked shape of Maryland doesn’t lend itself easily to good sign designs.)

This sign is readable and serviceable, but not more than that. Gordon Bull has the benefit of having a short last name, which means it can be featured prominently, but next to the giant “BULL” the small “GORDON” looks out of place and unbalances the composition.

This sign is very reminiscent of the sign Eric Wargotz used for his 2010 US Senate campaign, even down to the descender of the “g” interrupting the horizontal stripe separating the top and bottom halves of the sign. That’s not a bad thing, as I thought Wargotz’s sign would have been quite nice with some changes. Dongarra’s sign has those changes, most notably simplifying the horizontal stripe and moving the position and web site address to the bottom of the sign, and is all the better for them. (I’m not sure the star to the right of “Rebecca” was really necessary, but it does provide a bit of balance since “Rebecca” is shifted to the left a bit.)

Interestingly enough, this large Rebecca Dongarra sign follows the opposite strategy from Warren Miller’s and Tom Coale’s large signs, by not using the extra space to add the web address. Instead the web address is on the small sign. I think leaving off the web site address increases the impact of what was already a very good sign.

The name is very readable on this sign (a function of the typeface and using mixed upper and lower case), and the red, green, and blue colors work well together. However putting the “Democrat for Delegate - District 12” text in green impairs its readability, and together with the multiple occurrences of “Teacher” makes this sign almost look like one in the Board of Education race. Also, as with the Brian Bailey sign I’m not too big on including a map of Maryland; it makes the sign very crowded.

While this sign gets good marks for readability of Michael Gisriel’s last name, it’s just too busy. In particular it has 14 stars, which is about 12 or 13 stars too many. It also has the same problem as Bob Flanagan’s sign, namely poor readability of black text printed on a red background.

At only 10 stars rather than 14 this large version of Michael Gisriel’s sign is an improvement on the small sign.

The typeface for this sign is somewhat quirky and I think might impede readability a bit. However the more serious problem with this sign is the design element based on the Maryland flag: The left half is OK but in the right half the white background of the banner blends with the white background of the sign, so it no longer looks like a banner.

On this larger version of Terri Hill’s sign (advertising Ed Kasemeyer, who is unopposed in the primary) the text is more readable but the flag-based design element has the exact same problem as on the small sign. If anything the problem is worse because the banner is supposed to transition into the red horizontal strip, and the transition just looks messy.

A good straightforward sign, with good readability for the candidate’s name. I could do without the map of Maryland, which looks out of place, and I’m not sure what the slogan accomplishes other than telling us how to pronounce Joe Hooe’s last name.

The best thing about this sign is the last name: Clarence Lam is blessed with the shortest name of any candidate in this race, or for that matter any other Howard County race, and this sign pounds it into your skull with big bold yellow letters. I don’t really love the purple background color, but in general this is an effective sign.

This large Clarence Lam sign is the exact same design as his small sign, but it suffers in comparison by being so severely cropped on both sides.

From the candidate with the shortest last name we move to the candidate with the longest one. However Renée McGuirk-Spence is blessed with a hyphenated name with two almost equal-length parts, which means it can be neatly split across two lines. The result is a sign with a straightforward design, nothing fancy but it works well enough.

This sign has an unusual and interesting color combination. It’s a little strange though how “NICK” appears to be much more prominent than “STEWART.” The typeface is interesting too, but I think it’s a bit thin, which again impairs readability of the candidate’s last name.

Now for the results: Even though this race has a lot more candidates and thus a lot more signs than the District 9A and 9B races, it’s much easier for me to pick a winner. I think Rebecca Dongarra’s signs are the class of the field in terms of design; although several of the other signs have their good points, nothing else really comes close as far as I’m concerned.

In my next post I’ll evaluate signs for House of Delegates candidates in District 13.

UPDATE: I finally found a sign for Eric Ebersole, and updated the post to add it.

Patricia DiCarlo (patdicarlo13@gmail.com) - 2014-06-21 14:09

Siddiqui’s sign is the only one that gives a party affiliation. Is this legal?

hecker - 2014-06-21 17:50

Thanks for stopping by to comment! To answer your question: There are a number of other candidates other than Nayab Siddiqui who include party affiliation on their signs, including Eric Bouchat in the Maryland House of Delegates race in District 9A, and Brian Bailey in the House of Delegates race in District 12. It’s perfectly legal. (I should also add that putting only the candidate’s last name on a sign is also perfectly legal, as long as the last name matches the last name on the candidate’s filing papers.)

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Full disclosure: I publicly endorsed Tom Coale in this race almost a year ago (my, how time flies!), but will try not to let that affect my aesthetic judgment.

This sign’s design is uncluttered, I like the typeface, and it’s pretty readable from a distance. The star design fits in well and adds some interest, but the red portion of the design doesn’t show up well against the blue background. This is especially true of the thin red line dividing “TOM COALE” from “FOR DELEGATE,” which is almost invisible even up close. (In fact, I hadn’t noticed the line myself until I was writing this post.)

The large version of the sign, like the large Warren Miller sign, adds the web site address, and the arrangement of “TOM” and ”COALE” is modified to better fit the larger size. (The red elements of the design seem to show up better as well, but that may just be due to the particular lighting conditions in which I took the photograph.)

This simple minimal sign is like the Ward Morrow sign in my last post: There’s nothing wrong with it, and it’s attractive as far as it goes, but it also doesn’t stand out as particularly interesting.

I don’t have a picture that shows Bob Flanagan’s sign from his 2010 county council campaign in its entirety, but I believe this sign is basically the same design, even including the stalks of wheat on the left side. Unfortunately the stalks of wheat are almost invisible as printed in black ink on a red background; ditto for the “Ellicott City” at the bottom. Other than that the typeface is clean and legible; it’s very similar to the typeface on Tom Coale’s signs.

This large version of the Flanagan sign dispenses with the “Ellicott City” at the bottom, which I think is a definite improvement. It still has the black on red wheat stalks and horizontal line, but the larger size makes these elements more visible and lets them contribute more to the overall effect of the design.

My major problem with this sign is the busyness of the added design elements, in particular the star. The shape and positioning of those elements also reminded me somewhat of the star and crescent symbol associated with Islam—an odd association for a Republican candidate. As for the rest of the design, the serif typeface works well and the sign is pretty readable overall.

There are no clunkers in this collection of signs, and no breakout winners either. I think the best of the lot are Tom Coale’s small sign and Bob Flanagan’s large sign; they’re both attractive and show an effort to add some visual interest, and their flaws—such as they are—are not that consequential. However those who prefer a “plain vanilla” sign (one that’s attractive, free of obvious flaws, but somewhat bland) may like Rich Corkran’s sign better.

Finally, although it’s not a sign (and hence is not eligible in this particular “election”) I couldn’t resist highlighting this Tom Coale car magnet. Clearly it’s not a straightforward campaign item, but it promotes the candidate’s theme of being an advocate for Ellicott City: If you put this on your car, you’re advertising not only that you love Ellicott City, but that Tom Coale does too. And its attractiveness (due to an excellent Maryland flag-based design) means that more people will be inclined to put it on their cars and keep it there. I lost one of these in a car wash and was so upset I begged Tom Coale’s field director Kirsten Coombs to give me a replacement.

That’s all for now. In my next post I’ll evaluate signs (a lot of signs) for House of Delegates candidates in District 12.

UPDATE: After I originally posted this I came across the large version of Bob Flanagan’s sign, and in the interest of fairness and completeness I decided to update the post to include it, especially since I consider it one of the best signs in the group.

Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed.

In my opinion this sign goes overboard in its attempt to let the voters know exactly what kind of candidate Eric Bouchat is (and thus who he’s trying to appeal to). In fact, there’s so much other text that the actual position he’s running for gets relegated to a small space in the upper left. Design-wise the letters in “BOUCHAT” seem too blocky and close together, while the letters in “LIMITED” look to be spaced too widely compared to those in “GOVERNMENT,” presumably in an attempt to balance the two words in terms of length. Finally, the letters in “LIBERTARIAN CONSTITUTIONALIST” are so small I doubt they’d be readable except very close up.

This is the only diamond-shaped sign I’ve seen in the campaign, and there are reasons for why that’s the case: First, the shape doesn’t provide a lot of room for text. The very top and bottom of the sign can be used only for non-text elements (like the Maryland flag-inspired design here); even in areas closer to the center the text has to be relatively small in order to fit. Second, the support for the sign has to run through the middle of the sign, which means that the other side of the sign can’t be used.

This is an unusual red-white-and-blue design. I’ll give it credit for trying to do something out of the ordinary, but I don’t think the red triangle works well; in particular I think it reduces legibility a bit for the “R” and “S” in “CARSON.” I’m curious as to what the sign would look like with just a blue background in the upper half.

Like other GOP candidates Trent Kittleman does a little extra to try to stand out, in this case including a picture of herself. I’m only guessing here, but perhaps this was done both to highlight her role as the only female candidate in the race (from either party) and to help reduce potential confusion between herself and Allan Kittleman.

The sign’s color scheme, based on the four colors of the Maryland flag, is the same as Trent Kittleman’s sign in 2010 when she ran for Howard County Executive; in fact, except for the picture the design itself is almost identical. As I wrote at the time, it’s very tough to make this color scheme look good in a sign, especially if the sign uses red text on a yellow background or vice versa—the two colors are too similar, especially when (as in this sign) the red color ends up looking more orangish.

This is a good sign: The “Lorton” is very visible from a distance, due to the use of mixed upper and lower case (which tends to be more readable than all upper case), the large serif typeface, and the black outline around the letters, which tends to make them stand out from the background. The white on black “STATE DELEGATE” looks good as well, and the design element in the upper righthand corner adds interest and does a good job of balancing the “Kyle.” My only real criticism of the sign is that the red background looks somewhat dull and flat.

Note that unlike all the other Republican candidates’ signs, the Kyle Lorton sign doesn’t attempt to highlight his GOP/conservative/Tea Party bona fides; I think of it more as a “general election sign” (which assumes, of course, that Lorton will make it through the primary).

In this election Warren Miller continues his tradition of having good-looking examples of red-white-and-blue sign designs. In this version the blue is very dark, almost black, and makes an excellent contrast with the bright red of the top part. (At least I think the bottom color is blue; it’s really hard to tell for sure, even in close-up.) The typefaces are quite elegant and legible, with a nice rhythm in the text top to bottom: First “Warren” in mixed case, then “MILLER” in upper case in the same typeface, then “Conservative” in mixed case echoing “Warren,” albeit with a different and italic typeface, and then finally “STATE DELEGATE” in upper case in the main typeface, echoing “Miller.”

The only things I don’t like about this sign are the design elements in the upper corners, which I think add clutter and are not essential. The GOP elephant at the upper left I think is redundant given the highlighting of Miller as a conservative, and the flag at the upper right seems to be there just to balance the elephant in the design. I think the sign would look better and be more legible overall if those two elements were removed.

The most obvious difference in the larger Warren Miller sign is the addition of the “www.miller4delegate.com” web address. However this addition forced more subtle differences: In order to accommodate the address, the height of the bottom part of the sign was increased. The top part of the sign was also increased in height, presumably to keep the two parts in balance. Unfortunately this increase in height had a downside: Since the word “Conservative” is now further above the white border separating the red background from the blue background, and has more of the red background color surrounding it, optically it appears to be a bit smaller than it does in the small sign, even though the size of the text relative to “MILLER” is exactly the same.

I therefore think this sign would look better if the word “Conservative” were made slightly larger (say by 25% or so) and moved slightly lower down, so that it were equidistant between “MILLER” and the white horizontal divider. And as with the smaller sign, I think the design elements in the upper corners are not necessary.

This is an unfortunate example of a sign that is trying to be a campaign manifesto—unfortunate because the type is so small and the text so lengthy that even someone walking by rather than driving is unlikely to be able to easily read it all. Their task isn’t made any easier by the use of orange/red type on a yellow background, as with Trent Kittleman’s sign. Finally, I don’t like the Maryland flag-derived design elements to the left and right of “Maryland State Delegate 9A”; I think they overwhelm the text and make it harder to read.

This larger version of the previous Frank Mirabile sign improves on the previous sign in two ways. First, the “State Delegate 9A” is larger in size and uses a bolder typeface than “Maryland State Delegate 9A” on the previous sign, and matches the size of the flag-derived design elements. I still think those elements could be ditched, but at least the text can hold its own against them. Second, the campaign manifesto has been replaced by the pithier and more effective “Time to Stand Our Ground.” The message is further reinforced by the GOP elephant and “Don’t Tread On Me” snake in the lower right, although as on the Warren Miller signs I think those are superfluous and could have been removed.

This is a good solid sign, in the green and white color scheme used by many Democratic candidates. There’s not a whole lot else for me to say about it—there’s nothing wrong with the sign, and at the same time nothing that truly makes it stand out from the crowd.

s This combined sign for the two Democratic candidates nicely echoes the individual candidates’ signs: The typeface used for the names and the blue background to “Carson” hark back to Wally Carson’s sign, and the typeface used for “Elect” and “State Delegates 9A” and the green background to “Morrow” remind one of Ward Morrow’s sign.

Overall it’s a lively and visually interesting sign. My only gripe is that the word “Elect” seems out of balance with the rest of the sign; maybe it would have been better to leave it off?

I know this is a two-member district, but I find it hard to pick just two winners. My top three picks are the Kyle Lorton sign, the small Warren Miller sign, and the Carson/Morrow sign. I go back and forth on my ranking of the three; however I will say that if the (in my opinion) superfluous design elements were removed from the small Warren Miller sign then it would be my top pick—I just really like the colors and typefaces used in Warren Miller’s signs.

In my next post I’ll evaluate signs for House of Delegates candidates in District 9B.

Walter Carson (wcarson@columbiaunion.net) - 2014-06-15 15:25

Well done! Thank you for sharing your opinion and insights. Best wishes. WEC Sent from my iPhone

hecker - 2014-06-15 16:47

Thanks for stopping by to comment. I did early voting yesterday at the Miller Branch library, and fortunately was able to get pictures of all the signs I was previously missing, including yours and Ward Morrow’s.

So on to the judging, according to the criteria I’ve previously discussed. Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate, along with my comments in my role as amateur design critic.

This sign uses the by-now-familiar black on yellow scheme based on the Maryland flag. It’s an OK sign: It’s fairly legible, the typeface used for the name livens the sign up a bit, the central divider with a star works well, putting “Shari” to the right rather than the center makes the overall composition more interesting, and the “scales of justice” image in the upper left serves to balance out the “Shari.” I take points away for not putting the apostrophe on “Orphans’.”

This is a good example of a effective minimal sign design: Only as much text as needed, a single and simple sans serif typeface (the “for” appears to be simply in an oblique version of the main typeface), no extraneous design elements, and only a single color other than white. I have only one criticism: When viewed from a distance the “D” and “O” in “DODD” look somewhat similar, so that the name looks like “OOOO” or “DDDD.” A different typeface might have helped this, or alternatively using both upper and lower case (“Dodd” vs. “DODD”).

This sign has a nice purple background color (a break from the usual yellow or red), a good balance between the white foreground and purple background, and an interesting serif typeface. As with the Chase sign, I take points away for not spelling “Orphans’” properly.

This sign does a nice job of highlighting the candidate’s last name and the position being sought; it also highlights the fact that she’s an incumbent, which many voters might not know given that this is a relatively obscure courthouse race. I’m less enthusiastic about the burgundy color used for the text, and I’m not a big fan of the script used for “Re-Elect Judge.”

Of these four I like the Dodd and Miller signs the best. The other two are not bad signs, I just don’t think their designs stand out as being particularly attractive. (Note that in the context of a campaign sign “attractive” is not necessarily the same as “effective”; I’m judging signs primarily on aesthetic grounds.)

This concludes my look at signs for the courthouse races, at least for the primary. In my next post I’ll switch to the races for the Maryland state legislature, starting with the signs for candidates for the Maryland House of Delegates, District 9A.

This is the large Broccolino sign; as noted above the small sign is identical to this. I have to admit that when I first saw this I immediately thought, “What a great sign!” My eye was first drawn to the dramatic upward slant of the text in the design. Then I noticed the cleverness of the color scheme: First white on black, then yellow on black, then a dramatic switch to black on white, and then back to yellow on black again, so that no two lines of text are in the same color.

Besides being a good use of three of the four Maryland flag colors, the switching back and forth increases visual interest, and together with the upward slant of the design avoids the problem of visual “flatness” I previously identified in the large John Newnan sign for the Howard County Sheriff race. The white border, although relatively thin, serves to tie together the overall design and keep the black background from being overwhelming; again, compare this to the large John Newnan sign, which also had a black background but no border.

The sans serif typeface looks really good too; it’s an excellent choice for this design. Note also that the typeface is slightly oblique with the vertical strokes of the letters exactly parallel to the sides of the sign, which prevents the letters from looking crooked and adds further energy to the upward slant of the design; it’s little touches like these that turn a good sign into a great sign.

The sign is not perfect: The “State’s Attorney - Proven Leadership” tagline is somewhat small and not that readable at a distance, even in the large sign. Also, the “Democrat” in the lower right, which is also not that readable from a distance, seems to be there mainly to balance the composition.² But overall I can’t fault the design choices.

Rich Gibson’s sign is also a solid professional piece of work. (There are no slackers or amateurs in this race as far as signs are concerned.) The sans serif typeface for “RICH GIBSON” and “HOWARD COUNTY STATE’S ATTORNEY” looks good and is bold while remaining readable. The script typeface used for “Elect” and “for” is a nice contrast with the main font; it’s not as readable, but that’s not important since those words are mainly there to add visual interest. A darker orange is a good choice for the contrasting color; it’s a nice break from yellow (which would be the typical choice) and orange text on blue is significantly more readable than red on blue. The two vertical orange bars on both sides nicely highlight the main body of the sign.

Overall the sign is just a tad cluttered, but every visual element plays a role in the design, even the stylized Howard County map in the upper right corner, which balances the “Elect” in the upper left and the “for” in the lower left. Unlike the Broccolino sign, the Gibson sign features consecutive lines of text in the same color (“RICH” and “GIBSON” in white, and then “HOWARD COUNTY” and “STATE’S ATTORNEY” in orange). However I don’t see that as a problem, since if “HOWARD COUNTY” were omitted the “STATE’S ATTORNEY” line would be out of balance with the two lines of text above it.

My vote: I’ll give the Rich Gibson sign credit for a good performance, one that might have put it on top in another race. However unfortunately for it it’s up against the Dario Broccolino sign, one that I’d easily put in the top three for best Howard County campaign signs of 2014 thus far. I wouldn’t call this a landslide victory, but overall this is a clear win for the Broccolino sign.

This concludes my look at signs for the courthouse races. (I did see one sign for a candidate for Judge of the Orphans’ Court; if I see more signs for that race I’ll do a post then.) In my next post I’ll switch to the races for the Maryland state legislature, starting with the signs for candidates for the Maryland House of Delegates, District 9A.

UPDATE: Added a bit about the small Broccolino sign, and refined my comments on the large sign.

Both Fitzgerald and Newnan have multiple types of signs; I think I got pictures of all of Newnan’s but may have missed one of Fitzgerald’s. Here are the signs, in alphabetical order by candidate and from small to large for each candidate, along with my comments.

This is the basic Fitzgerald sign in its most minimal form. Fitzgerald is using the same black on yellow color scheme (two of the four colors from the Maryland flag) as last election; in fact this sign and others appear to be unchanged from 2010. This is a good sign in my opinion, simple, legible, and uncluttered in its design. The typeface is nothing fancy but works well, and I like the white border.

This sign is a departure from the normal Fitzgerald sign template in its use of a blue and white color scheme and a different typeface. It’s a nice attempt to do something different but I don’t think it really works, mainly because the star intended to be the “O” in “POLICE” doesn’t actually look that much like an “O.” As a result I tend to read the sign as saying “PLICE FOR FITZGERALD.”

This sign is essentially the small sign above blown up to a large size and with a “Police Endorsed” sticker covering the six-pointed sheriff’s star. Possibly because it lacks the white border, this sign seems more “oppressive” than the corresponding small sign, and the blue on white sticker lightens the look of the sign and adds some visual interest.

This sign is also based on the small sign writ large, this time with the “Endorsed by …” tagline at the top right. As with the previous sign, I think the sign is improved by adding an additional element beyond those on the small sign.

Turining to John Newnan, there’s a lot to like about this small sign. The name is nicely legible, and the oblique typeface used for the word “VOTE” adds some dynamism to the sign. A nice subtle touch is the use of a thin red outline around both “VOTE” and the candidate’s name; there’s also a red drop shadow (not an outline) used for the phrase “SHERIFF OF HOWARD COUNTY.” The red makes the words pop out from the black background and further livens up the sign. Together with the black background and the yellow and white type the inclusion of a touch of red also makes this sign a textbook example of how to use all four colors of the Maryland flag in a very effective way.

My one criticism of this sign is that the phrase “SHERIFF OF HOWARD COUNTY” is pretty small, and the tagline below it is smaller still; I doubt either of these is that readable from a car moving fast. I think I understand why the full position was used: Since the word “SHERIFF” is as long as “NEWNAN,” if it were made smaller on the sign then there would be blank space on either side of the word that would make the composition of the sign look a bit unbalanced, unless some design elements were placed at either side of it. However I still think the tagline could have been omitted.

This large sign uses the same basic color scheme of yellow and white type on black background as in the small sign, but lacks the red highlighting (possibly for reasons of cost?). Unfortunately leaving the red out means that the yellow and white type looks somewhat flat and lifeless against the black background. The endorsement line is also rather long and hence less readable, and the use of a seven-pointed rather than six-pointed star is somewhat jarring. (Maybe Newnan avoided using the six-pointed star for some sort of obscure legal reason? But he did use it in the sign below, albeit not conspicuously.)

I’ll be up front here: I am not a big fan of signs that show a picture of the candidate; I think that’s better reserved for a web site or direct mail piece. There’s a lot going on in this sign: the candidate photo, the (barely visible) sheriff’s star next to the candidate, not one but two pointers to online information, the red and white stripes, and yet another slogan. I think it’s all too much of a muchness.

My vote: I really like the design choices on the small Newnan sign. It would probably be my pick if it had been more minimal, e.g., including just “SHERIFF” rather than “SHERIFF OF HOWARD COUNTY,” and omitting the tagline at the bottom. However given those shortcomings, at least in this election I’ll instead vote for the tried-and-true choice, namely the basic Fitzgerald sign in its small version.

Tune in next time, when I’ll look at the signs in the Howard County State’s Attorney race.

Kemp Freund (kemp.freund@verizon.net) - 2014-06-26 22:08

Frank - on Newnan’s signs you commented on the use of the 7 point star. The HCSO actually wears a 7 point star but an inverted version of the one on Newnan’s sign (which is generic clip art). Fitzgerald used a clip art 6 point star on his signs, probably because his printer had that artwork and most people don’t really pay attention to the star in the first place. But if you look at the Sheriff’s marked cars, their patch and the actual badge you will see a gold 7 point star with the Maryland seal in the center. BTW - did you ever see anything from the mystery Republican candidate? I am wondering if he intends to run on name recognition alone and hope that the public thinks that they are voting for the retiring Police Chief.

hecker - 2014-06-26 22:32

Thanks for stopping by to comment, and for the detailed explanation! I never did see any signs for the GOP side of this race. Maybe closer to the general election?

Cherie Beck (cheriebeck@gmail.com) - 2014-07-10 12:40

Just looking around Frank…noticed the comment above. Says it’s by me. What a surprise, since I didn’t write it, Someone must have used my email address as a generic author.

hecker - 2014-07-27 18:32

Cherie: I think I cleaned up the comment in question.

I should say up front that it’s not clear at all that campaign signs are actually effective in persuading to vote for one candidate rather than another. As a 2012 Slate article notes, some research has shown that non-specific campaign signs urging people to vote (though not for a particular candidate) can be effective, but that says nothing about candidate-specific signs. On the other hand, a Vanderbilt University study seems to indicate that signs can be effective in promoting candidates in races in which they are a large number of candidates and voters have little information about them. There are some political consultants who feel strongly that yard signs are a waste of money, and others who are happy to advise you on which types of signs are more effective.

In any case, I think campaign signs lend a festive air to election years, and from a purely aesthetic standpoint offer interesting examples of both good and bad graphic design. As a amateur design critic here’s what I personally look for in a campaign sign:

Legibility. Whatever other attributes a sign has, at a minimum it has to be readable. There’s nothing more frustrating than driving down a road at 30 or 40 miles per hour, seeing a small campaign sign, and not being able to figure out which candidate it’s for.

Information. Assuming that the primary purpose of a sign is to promote name recognition, then obviously it needs to include the candidate’s name (full name or just last name) and the office they’re seeking, Anything else—party affiliation, slogans, icons and images, candidate picture, etc.—is arguably superfluous.

Color. Some people have specific recommendations on sign colors. Others tend toward traditional colors, like the American flag colors red, white, and/or blue, or the Maryland flag colors black, red, white (silver), and yellow (gold). Many signs use other colors to good effect, and they get bonus points from me for doing that. My main comments here are that some color combinations (like red and blue) impair readability, and that using the Maryland flag colors in an effective way can be hard if you use more than two colors at a time.

Typography. Beyond being readable, I like to see sign typefaces that are clean, dynamic, elegant, and work well together (if multiple typefaces are being used) and in the context of the sign.

Other design elements. Some signs have additional graphic elements, for example stars, small flags, etc. I judge these on how well they work in the overall context of the sign: do they enhance the design, or detract from it?

To illustrate the above criteria, here are some examples of signs I liked from the 2010 campaigns (click on the images to see them full-size). Note that I didn’t get pictures of all 2010 signs, so don’t consider this a true “best of 2010” list.

I thought this sign for Bob Ballinger was an excellent sign for a non-partisan Board of Education campaign. It gets the basics right in terms of legibility and conveying the essential information. The green background color and the typeface resemble chalk writing on a blackboard and thus highlight the theme of education in a nice subtle way that avoids the design clichés common in Board of Education signs (for example, apples).

Again, like all my favorite signs this sign for Byron Macfarlane (for Register of Wills) is quite readable and highlights the essential information. The blue background color is pleasing to the eye and not overbearing (as some darker blues can be), while the yellow element in the upper left-hand corner adds visual interest in a nice contrast of colors. The typeface is quite elegant and has an air of formality about it that is appropriate for a courthouse election, especially for a position involving estates and trusts—it’s reminiscent of a typeface that a bank or financial advisor might use.

I thought this sign for Gail Bates and Warren Miller (for the Maryland House of Delegates) did several things well: It did a good job of highlighting the “team” aspect of their campaign. It made excellent use of the traditional red, white, and blue colors, which with its implications of patriotism is a favorite color combination for many Republican candidates. The typeface is bold but still readable. Finally, the design element invoking the Maryland flag nicely filled in the overall design.

This was my overall favorite of the signs I saw in 2010: It was pared down to only the essential candidate information (last name and position sought, with “Howard County” implied rather than explicitly stated on the latter). The colors were nice and complemented each other well. The typeface was somewhat unconventional (i.e., not a over-used serif typeface like Times Roman or sans serif typeface like Helvetica) but was quite legible and conveyed a feeling of dynamism. Finally, the design element of a stalk of wheat enhanced the design and evoked the rural roots of Howard County.

That concludes the preliminaries. In my next post I’ll start looking at the 2014 signs; unlike last time I’ll do this race by race and (where possible and appropriate) pick an overall winner in each.

In my travels around Howard County I’ve been photographing campaign signs when and where I could. However I’m still missing signs for several candidates for local races and would like to include them if possible. Here are the candidates for whom I do not have sign photos ; note that I have not included candidates who are unopposed in the primary election (like Calvin Ball) or even in the general election (like Mary Kay Sigaty):

• Howard County Council, District 1
  • David Melton
• Howard County Council, District 2
  • Reg Avery
  • Calvin Ball
  • Ralph Colavita
• Howard County Council, District 3
  • Jen Terrasa
• Howard County Council, District 4
  • Mary Kay Sigaty
• Howard County Council, District 5
  • Greg Fox
  • Alan Schneider
• Howard County Board of Education
  • Maureen Arthurs (have pictures)
  • Zaneb Beams
  • Allen Dyer
  • Sandra French
  • Dan Furman
  • Christine O’Connor
• Maryland House of Delegates, District 9A
  • Eric Bouchat (have pictures)
  • Trent Kittleman (have a picture)
• Maryland House of Delegates, District 9B
  • Rich Corkran (have pictures)
• Maryland House of Delegates, District 12
  • Brian Bailey (have pictures)
  • Gordon Bull
  • Jay Cohen
  • Eric Ebersole (got pictures)
  • Joe Hooe
  • Renee McGuirk-Spence (have pictures)
  • Rick Martel
  • Adam Sachs
• Maryland House of Delegates, District 13
  • Danny Eaton
  • Jimmy Williams
  • Chris Yates
• Judge of the Orphans’ Court
  • Shari Lynne Chase (have pictures)
  • Anne Dodd (have pictures)
  • Ellen Harrison
  • Nicole Bormel Miller (have pictures)
  • Emma Travis-Howard
  • Leslie Smith Turner (have pictures)
• Sheriff
  • John McMahon

If you happen to see signs for any of these people in your neighborhood and it’s safe for you to stop and take a picture on your smartphone or camera, please feel free to send the picture(s) to me at frank@frankhecker.com; I’ll gladly give you a photo credit if you request it.

UPDATE: I mistakenly had Ellen Flynn Giles as a candidate this year for Board of Education. Thanks to Joan Lancos for setting me straight.

UPDATE 2: I have updated the post to mark cases where I now have pictures of signs. I still do not have signs for the remaining candidates.

Joan Lancos (joanlancos@yahoo.com) - 2014-06-02 12:59

Ellen Giles is not a candidate for BOE at this time. She was re-elected in 2012 to a four year term.

hecker - 2014-06-02 13:08

D’oh! Brain freeze there, I will update the post. Thanks, Joan!

This post continues my thoughts on the concept of “market democracy” as described in John Tomasi’s book Free Market Fairness. In this post and the next I explore the second core idea of market democracy, that of society as a “spontaneous order”:¹

Complex productive systems [such as those that produce pencils and other goods] typically were not planned; they evolved. They are products of human action but not of human design. Friedrich Hayek argues that a free society is best thought of as a spontaneous order in which people should be allowed to pursue their own goals on the basis of information available only to themselves. (p. xii)

At the simplest level the idea of society as a spontaneous order is opposed to the idea that most or even all aspects of society can be (or should be) centrally planned on a rational basis. Central planning was discredited in theory by the arguments of Ludwig von Mises, Hayek, and others that the problem of calculating prices and allocating resources in a planned economy was intractable, and was discredited in practice by the demise of the Soviet Union and command socialism in general. So spontaneous order won the battle, QED, end of story.

Except that the story really doesn’t end there, and if one agrees with Tomasi (as I do) that society is a spontaneous order, there are still interesting questions worth exploring. First up is the issue that Tomasi addresses in the preface:

Sometimes spontaneous order is used in what I shall call an ontological sense. A society either is a spontaneous order or it is not one. . . . If a society is a spontaneous order, then it is sometimes claimed that whatever rules, norms, and distributions result from spontaneous processes are justified by that very fact. . . .

Other times, however, the idea of spontaneous order is used to denote, not a state of affairs, but a strategy of social construction. In pursuit of desired ends we have the choice of employing spontaneous orders or other types of order—typically, orders that are more direct and planned. (p. xv)

Tomasi comes down on the second side of this question: “Market democracy rejects the ontological use of spontaneous order theory. It affirms spontaneous order as a strategy of social construction.” But that immediately raises further questions: Suppose we consciously decide that society should be organized as a spontaneous order “in pursuit of desired ends.” Can we do that in any positive way, as opposed to simply taking a laissez-faire attitude to events as they unfold? If so, is it possible to “design for spontaneous order,” in the sense of creating social institutions that will maximize the beneficial possibilities inherent in the spontaneous order that leverages such institutions? Is this a one-time task, after which we can safely lean back and watch society evolve? Or are there potential pathologies to which spontaneous orders are vulnerable, and which might require ongoing revisions to societal institutions, including revisions which might restrict the economic freedoms Tomasi views as basic?

Unfortunately I think Tomasi’s discussion of spontaneous orders suffers from his use of “admittedly homey” but (in my opinion) too simplistic analogies. In particular he contrasts putting together a Lego model according to a detailed list of instructions with the crystallization of sugar in solution under the influence of general physical laws, using the former as an analogue of Hayek’s taxis or made order and the latter as an analogue of Hayek’s cosmos or spontaneous order: “Unlike the principles governing the construction of the Lego model, the principles governing the construction of the crystals are endogenous and intrinsic. . . . The model is made, the crystal grows.” (p. 144)

This paints a picture of the entities within the spontaneous order being swept along under the influence of physical laws, without agency or intention, with the outcome being ordained by nature. Tomasi does acknowledge the potential role of intentional design in creating the spontaneous order that is human society:

Some one or some group had to decide to create the conditions in which the candy crystals could spontaneously form. . . . The makers of rock candy are in this way very like the designers of a constitution to govern a liberal society. Even without being able (or seeking) to control the details of the order that will emerge, both sets of orders require a maker, and that maker’s intentionality pervades the order that results. (p. 153)

He also believes that in constructing of the foundations of a social order we can and should be guided by our knowledge of the ways in which spontaneous orders develop, and that we can and should evaluate different foundations according to criteria important to us—a way to introduce considerations of social justice into a vision that would (at least as initially conceived) seem to exclude it:

According to Hayek, the rules of just individual conduct that most effectively govern a liberal social order are rules we discover, rather than rules we attempt to create. But this . . . does not eliminate the role of intentionality in the formation of social orders. . . . It is knowledge of molecular rules that makes human intentionality effective, given some norm that allows us to distinguish good candy making from bad. . . . With sugar crystal orders, so too with human social orders: once basic laws are discovered we employ intentionality to tweak the system to our purposes. In the domain of political institutions, these purposes are ultimately defined by a theory of justice. (p. 153-154)

But if our task is to discover the rules promoting the creation and growth of spontaneous orders that promote justice in human society, the analogy of the sugar crystals in solution paints an overly simplistic and misleading picture. Just moving from a physical to a biological analogy would be more realistic: An ecosystem of organisms evolving through time via the mechanism of natural selection would count as a spontaneous order, and would yield more insights into the characteristics of spontaneous orders. For example, organisms evolve to fill certain ecological niches, analogous to divisions of labor within an economy, and the complexity of both organisms and ecosystems increases over time, with no need for an intelligent designer.

The spontaneous order that is the global ecosystem also has its downsides as well. One major one is the existence of parasites: organisms that live off of others and have evolved quite ingenious ways to do so, for example getting first crack at its host’s food by replacing the host’s tongue, or manipulating the host’s nervous system to redirect the host’s behavior to its own ends. It’s hypothesized that much of evolutionary change, up to and including the “invention” of sex, has been in the service of reducing the impact of parasites. Another downside is the possibility of evolutionary “stagnation” or “maladaption”: Natural selection operates on a local scale, being based on the differential reproductive success of individual organisms, and does not take account more global or long-term considerations, leaving species vulnerable to extinction as environments change.

Modeling a spontaneous order simply as a physical system (even as just a metaphor) fails even more severely when applied to a society of relatively autonomous individuals who can both act and think for themselves, not to mention join with others in collective action—in Tomasi’s terms it’s like making rock candy when the sugar molecules can think for themselves and interfere with the recipe.

To better see what “society as a spontaneous order” entails, what we need for a model is something that’s complicated enough to be realistic but simpler than looking at society itself in all its rich history and complexity. We actually have such a model, and you’re using it to read this post; more on that in a follow-up post, in which I complete my discussion of society as a spontaneous order by focusing on the design, history, and pathologies of the Internet.

Turchin’s big topic is cliodynamics, “the new transdisciplinary area of research at the intersection of historical macrosociology, economic history/cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases.” The idea that human history moves in cycles is a very old one; what is new about the approach of Turchin and other like-minded researchers is their attempt to mathematically model these cycles, using techniques similar to those used for modeling the dynamics of biological ecosystems. Given the lack of good data about historical trends this can be a challenge, but the results are interesting enough for me to look forward to seeing where the discipline goes from here. One area where Turchin has some interesting things to say is American history, specifically his idea that demographics and other factors have driven what he calls the “double helix of inequality and well-being.” The general idea, outlined in an Aeon Magazine article and accompanying blog post, is that “general well-being (that is, of the overwhelming majority of population) tends to move in the opposite direction from inequality: when inequality grows, well-being declines, and vice versa.” Here Turchin measures well-being using an index of four variables (one being age at marriage, on the theory that pessimistic people tend to marry later) and inequality using the ratio of the wealth of the richest Americans to the median wealth (i.e., 50% of Americans have more wealth, 50% less).

Turchin notes that these indices move opposite to each other (i.e., times of low inequality are times of higher well-bring, and vice versa), not necessarily because one directly causes the other but (in Turchin’s view) because both reflect an underlying dynamical system driven by several factors: the supply of labor, returns to business owners and managers, political competition among the economic elites (due to what Turchin calls “elite overproduction”), changes in social norms, and so on.¹ Turchin is working on a book, A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, to explain and justify his theory in more detail; although the book hasn’t been published yet, he’s made a draft available online if you want to check it out.²

No scientific theory worthy of the name is complete without making some predictions (or, as Turchin calls it in this case, a projection). Turchin went out on a limb and made a major one three years ago in a letter [PDF] published in the magazine Nature:

In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. . . . Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. . . . In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020.

For a quick overview of why Turchin thinks 2020 is the likely timeframe, see the 2013 Aeon article referenced above, the slides [PPT] for a presentation he gave in 2011, or (if you have a bit more time) his 2012 paper “Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780–2010” [PDF].

Even if Turchin’s theory is valid, it’s not going to be so precise as to be able to make predictions down to the exact year. The theory is also silent on exactly how such an “instability spike” might manifest itself. But it is intriguing to think about what might be happening in the US around the time President Clinton or President Christie runs for re-election, if present trends continue.

It was the attitude expressed in Kling’s tagline that actually led to my subscribing to his blog. Kling is an economist of generally libertarian views, part of a group that includes Bryan Caplan, Art Carden, Tyler Cowen, and others (many formally or informally associated with George Mason University). Economists of any political persuasion can be dogmatic and dismissive of those holding opposing views, as can libertarians whether they’re economists or not. It’s a fairly common conceit among some that they arrived at their own views by a process of disinterested reasoning, and that by implication those who disagree with them are stupid or malicious or both.

So when Kling stopped blogging at Econlog and moved to his personal blog it was a pleasant surprise to read his philosophy of blogging:

I want to model a very particular style of discourse, as indicated by the tag line “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree.” . . . I will try to keep the posts here free of put-downs, snark, cheap shots, straw-man arguments, and taking the least charitable interpretation of what others say. So, if what you most enjoyed about my past blogging efforts were the put-downs, be prepared for disappointment with this incarnation.

That was enough to put Kling on my list of blogs to read regularly. In reading him since then I’ve found he’s generally kept to that stance, with only a few occasions where he’s become exasperated with what he thinks are others’ shoddy and self-serving arguments.

One of the most interesting features of Kling’s blog posts is his analysis of what he calls the “three-axis model” of politics:

My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.

This is in some respects Kling’s own adaptation of the ideas of Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, who’ve argued that people are predisposed to view moral issues according one or more of several “moral foundations.” (I blogged about this previously in the context of possible genetic influences on political views. Kling has also written an excellent essay discussing Haidt’s ideas.) Thus, for example, the “civilization/barbarism” axis roughly corresponds to a combination of the “loyalty/disloyalty,” “authority/subversion,” “sanctity/degradation,” and (to some extent) “fairness/cheating” moral foundations hypothesized by Haidt et.al.

Kling has expanded on the three-axis model in a book, The Three Languages of Politics. It’s well worth reading, and you can’t beat the price. Kling has also further discussed and applied the three-axis model in a number of blog posts.

Kling frequently takes his own advice (in the essay on Haidt linked to above) to “call your own fouls,” that is, to “expose intellectual error on our own side” and “search as hard for holes in our allies’ arguments as if they were opponents’ arguments.” This often leads him to espouse what I might call (in imitation of Andrew Sullivan) a “libertarianism of doubt.” For example, in an essay on libertarianism and group norms he points out that libertarians’ emphasis on individualism leads them to denigrate the tendency people have to conform to group norms, a tendency that arguably makes modern liberal (in the classical sense) and democratic societies possible. I think on balance this willingness to “think it possible that you may be mistaken” makes Kling a more effective advocate for libertarianism than the many others who are more certain and more strident.

Gervase Markham - 2013-08-26 09:06

My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.

Fascinating. Notice that one of these axes is not like the others. Coercion and free choice are on an axis because if you have more coercion, you have less free choice and vice versa. Civilization and barbarism are on an axis because if you have more civilization, you have less barbarism and vice versa. But oppressors and oppressed are not on an axis, because more oppressors doesn’t mean fewer oppressed, or vice versa. So I think that axis is mis-stated. I think a better statement of the progressive axis ends could be power hierarchies vs. egalitarianism, or oppression vs. freedom for all. The problem with the latter is that if you are working for “freedom for all”, then that leads to the question: “so why aren’t you libertarian or anarchist?”… So perhaps that’s not the right way of expressing their view, because progressivism tends to lead to (governmental) coercion rather than free choice.

hecker - 2013-08-27 01:19

Hey Gerv, thanks for stopping by! I agree that the oppressor/oppressed axis isn’t as well-expressed as the others. What Kling should have done IMO is to simply carry over Jonathan Haidt’s formulation of the moral foundation most characteristic of (American) liberals and progressives. Haidt referred to this foundation as “care/harm”, which makes more sense than “oppressors/oppressed” in two ways. First, per your point it would make more sense as an axis: more care, less harm. Second, it accounts for cases where liberals/progressives favor government action for predominantly paternalistic reasons, where there’s no clear “oppressor” per se but there’s a chance of people being harmed in some way. (One example of this is mandatory helmet laws for motorcyclists.) It’s like the second half of the First law of Robotics: “… or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” (Which I guess means Isaac Asimov was a progressive.)

I like this mainly for the obvious but nice “A+” design element. The slogan is too small to read, and the domain name could be ditched in favor of increasing the size of “Board of Education.”

As I previously noted, red, white, and blue colors on a campaign sign are usually associated with Republicans, although for some reason Gail Bates and Warren Miller are the only local GOP candidates whose signs I can recall using them. (Eric Wargotz’s sign also used red, white, and blue, though in a very understated way.) Note the attempt to link together “Bates” and “Miller” via the design.

Professional, competent, albeit a bit on the bland side.

Again the colors are a cliché, but here done to really excellent effect. Note that this sign is even more effective in linking Gail Bates and Warren Miller into a single entity “BatesMiller” in the minds of voters. Also note that the small banner works better here as a single design element, as opposed to being duplicated as it was in the sign above. This is such a great sign that it’s a shame it wasn’t displayed more as a standalone sign; most if not all of the times I saw it it was paired with signs for other GOP candidates immediately above it and/or below it.

Understatedly elegant, soberly professional, but with a nice yellow design element to rescue it from stuffiness—a sign you’d feel good entrusting your estate to.

This design uses an informal typeface on a green background to nicely evoke chalk on a classroom blackboard and thus the theme of education, without being overly literal or using common clichés (e.g., apples).

Large text that conveys only the basic information needed, nice contrasting typefaces (with the top one lending an air of liveliness to the sign), a unique choice of complementary colors (including a subtle gradient on the bottom half), and good balance in the design between the top half, the bottom half, and the white border. But what really takes this design from good to great is the stand of wheat to the right: it adds visual interest, ties back to the official Howard County seal, and evokes the rural past of the country in a way calculated to appeal both to conservative older residents and more liberal newcomers concerned about environmental issues. This one got my vote for the best Howard County campaign sign of 2010.

Who will emerge the victors in the race for best Howard County campaign signs of 2014? If I have time (and remember to take pictures) I’ll be back again next year to tell you.

hotboy2545 (taylor2545@gmail.com) - 2013-07-08 05:20

Looks like the campaign was pretty nice. Did you vote for anyone that won? [edited to remove spam link]

Based on the sign it appears that Frank Mirabile’s campaign website had (has?) a very long domain name; was frankmirabile.com taken? The stars are an interesting design element, but the middle and largest star looks somewhat chopped off.

One of several signs to use combinations of the colors in Maryland’s state flag: red, white, black, and gold. This one is unusual in attempting to use all four at once (if we count the thin white border). Note that in the actual Maryland flag the red and white elements are visually separated from the black and gold elements, and in particular there is minimal juxtaposition of red and gold.

There’s a lot to like about this sign, including the nice intrusion of the descender of the letter “g” into the middle design element. It might have been improved by ditching the slogan (who has time to read slogans at 30-40 mph?) and the domain name and bringing “US Senate” into the bottom half of the sign, leaving the middle red and blue elements plain. (P.S. Yes, I know that this wasn’t strictly speaking a “local” election.)

Presumably whoever designed this sign believed that when voters saw “Kittleman” they’d think “Allan.”

Another example of a bold black on yellow color scheme, this time incorporating a design element to good effect. (Some Fitzgerald signs covered this star with a sticker indicating a police union endorsement.)

Here yellow serves as the text color. I’m genuinely uncertain as to whether this sign would have been better served by using white as the text color instead: I think white text would have been more readable, but many candidates were using white text on blue in 2010, to the point of it being a cliché.

I recall driving myself crazy trying to figure out what the logo in the upper right corner was supposed to represent. Other than that it’s a nice sign.

Tune in tomorrow for part 3!

I’m not a professional graphic designer, so don’t expect any truly profound thoughts. However I do think I have at least a modicum of good taste and some basic understanding of what makes a good campaign sign design. With that in mind, here are some general comments before we get to the signs themselves:

• Less is more when it comes to campaign signs. Whether campaign signs actually make a difference or not is disputed. However as this article notes, if it does nothing else a sign has to reinforce the candidate’s name in the minds of the voters, and readability is paramount in that. The only mandatory elements are the candidate’s last name and the office they’re seeking.
• Getting colors right is important. Some color combinations are a cliché at this point, like red, white, and blue (especially popular with Republicans) or green (increasingly popular with Democrats). Other color combinations are really hard to make work. (We’ll see some examples later.)
• Design is a lot more subtle than people realize, though I think it’s possible for people to take it overboard. (See for example this discussion of the typefaces used by the Obama and Romney campaigns.) I personally think it’s worth finding the best graphic designer you can, even if they’re somewhat more expensive. If you don’t feel confident in your own taste find a disinterested third party (like someone you know who’s “arty”) and ask them for advice.

And now without further ado, a gallery of 2010 campaign signs and my comments on them; again, remember that I didn’t manage to get pictures of everyone’s sign, so this is only a selection:

How much more minimal could this be? The answer is none. None more minimal. But, as noted above, it gets the job done.

At the other end of the spectrum, a sign with personality to burn.

Here the personality gets turned down, but the red-and-white color scheme remains.

A color scheme that (deliberately?) puns on the candidate’s name. It’s also the political equivalent of showing up at a party wearing the same dress as someone else—although to be fair there were a number of copycat design schemes in 2010, including (as we’ll see) the ubiquitous white text on dark blue background.

Lavender’s a color you don’t see that often in campaign signs.

Using a foot as a design element was presumably an idea that was impossible to resist. Note also that this sign refers to the “School Board”; I think all the other candidates’ signs referred to the “Board of Education.”

Brian Meshkin was one of several candidates listing a campaign website as an alternative to having people do a Google search for more information. I didn’t notice until looking very closely that it also includes instructions for texting him.

More 2010 campaign signs to come in part 2!

Although I don’t agree with Tom on every single issue, I’ve always admired the process by which he comes to his positions and justifies them publicly. I think his approach in this campaign exemplifies that process, as seen in his blog posts and on his campaign website.

First, he’s starting with a clear focus on the local problems of his potential constituency in Ellicott City: basically the things that anyone living here for any length of time would be aware of, including the economic health and environmental well-being of the historic downtown. The one thing I haven’t seen him comment on yet is the process and prospects for revitalizing and upgrading the Route 40 corridor. It’s a less glamorous issue than the fate of historic Ellicott City and also a harder one to crack, since the Route 40 strip by its nature will always be more of a place to drive through than to drive to. Nonetheless there’s been a lot of talk about Route 40 revitalization over the years, and I’d be interested in Tom’s thoughts on how he might work as a state delegate to further that process along.

Second, I like Tom’s crisp summation of the principles he thinks are important—good government, smart government, and your government—and I’d like to say little more about each one.

“Good government” is something we should be able to take for granted, but unfortunately cannot in many jurisdictions. Having government be free of corruption and not unduly influenced by special interests is especially important for the Democratic Party, traditionally thought of as the party of government. For the GOP wrongdoing by elected officials, even Republican elected officials, reinforces the argument that government is inevitably flawed and can accomplish nothing of importance compared to private enterprise. But for the Democratic Party official wrongdoing strikes at the very heart of the party’s presumed reason for being, namely to serve all people and not just the wealthy or politically connected.

With regard to “smart government,” Tom writes that “I honestly believe that when most people say they favor ‘small government’, they really mean ‘smart government’. If a program was effectively placing low income single mothers in gainful employment while offering reliable daycare, we would want that program to grow, serve more people, and change more lives.” I disagree a bit with Tom here. For one thing, there are a fair number of libertarians and others of similar opinion who object to government on principled grounds having to do with the morality of state coercion. There are also a fair number of people who object to particular forms of government spending for less principled reasons. For them the issue is not whether government spending is effective or not, but whether it goes to “those people” instead of “our people.” (I should also add that you can find this attitude on both sides of the party lines.)

Nevertheless Tom is correct that legislators should strive to do things that are effective in solving the problems that are supposedly at issue, and should pull back on or eliminate programs that lack such effectiveness. Again this is important in restoring and maintaining people’s trust in government and in a party that positions itself as supportive of government. It’s also important in restoring and maintaining the stature and status of government workers themselves. Every wasteful and ineffective government program makes it that much harder to justify providing adequate pay and benefits for those government employees responsible for implementing such programs.

Besides the points Tom has already made in his blog post and campaign materials, I’d be interested in seeing Tom’s take on the approach Jim Manzi and others have advocated of undertaking controlled experiments to measure the effectiveness of government programs and related interventions. (See for example Manzi’s book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Government.) I don’t know that this approach would be politically palatable (for the same reasons that no one in a clinical trial wants to receive a placebo), but we do have a lot of local Maryland expertise in the relevant statistical and experimental disciplines, for example at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other institutions, and I think this idea is worth at least some initial exploration.

Finally, I agree with Tom’s points regarding government being “your government,” including that the goal should not be just transparency but clarity, particularly including clarity about Tom’s own motives and actions as a delegate should he be elected. If he does end up in the House of Delegates, I think that will be an interesting landscape for Tom to navigate. As a member of the Columbia Association Board of Directors he was among a small group of relatively equal players. As a newly elected delegate, on the other hand, he would be expected to be a “team player” when it came to the legislative programs promoted by the House of Delegates leadership. What he himself might think is right may well be in conflict with the need to “go along to get along” when it comes to receiving desired committee assignments and acquiring some measure of influence within the legislature to advance the goals he thinks are important. I have faith in Tom’s principles, but neither he nor anyone else can forever avoid the inevitable conflicts between principle and expediency.

With that said, I look forward to seeing Tom’s campaign evolve as the 2014 races heat up. Not to take anything away from the other announced or potential candidates in District 9B, whether Democrats or Republicans, but as did Dennis Lane Tom plays a special and vital role in the local Howard County scene, and I think I can speak for others when I say that I’d be overjoyed to see him advance to a bigger role on a larger stage.

Tom Coale has already done a good wrap-up, so I’ll confine myself to a couple of thoughts continuing the analogy above. First, what I’ll call the “anti-Arbor” faction faces a decision on strategy similar to that of the anti-Obamacare GOP post-2010: They apparently don’t have the votes to reverse the decision outright, so they face a choice between trying to shape the Inner Arbor plan more to their liking, making compromises where they can find them, or throwing sand in the gears of CA governance to try to delay things until they can re-take a board majority and kill the plan then.

I have no idea which strategy they’ll choose, and in one sense I don’t care—they’ll do what they want to do regardless of what I think. I’m more concerned about the strategy of those who favor the Inner Arbor plan and the accompanying 21st century redevelopment of Columbia. In a recent post unsuccessful candidate Julia McCready rues the “sliminess” in the electoral process. I understand her being upset, especially about untruths allegedly spread by the incumbent. Tom Coale also writes of “blatant and intentional lies” from Inner Arbor opponents. Going back to the GOP analogy, it sounds like someone’s been exercising their inner Karl Rove (or Lee Atwater, to use an example for an older generation). However I think the operative advice here is, “Don’t get mad, get even.”

How to do that? In another post Julia looks to the passing of the Pioneer generation: “None of us are immortal. The time will come when those in power are gone.” Unfortunately I think this is like the Democratic party looking to demographic change for its salvation. Consider that even 70-ish Inner Arbor opponents can expect to live another 16 years or so if male, and almost 19 years if female, and they may attract younger proteges and supporters in the meantime. Waiting in and of itself is not going to win the day.

What will? I think Tom Coale has the right idea: “forward-thinking candidates” are going to have to build their own networks of dedicated supporters, people who will turn out reliably to testify at CA board meetings and vote in CA and village board elections. This will require not just online activism but old-fashioned offline relationship building and dues-paying, not just for a year or two leading up to the next CA elections but for the long term.

Which leaves me with a final question: Are there enough competent and energetic people who have the patience and stamina for that, especially in an era when Columbia is no longer the “new city upon a hill” but a suburb much like any other? The Columbia Pioneers have spent over thirty years promoting their vision of Columbia; is the next generation of Columbians prepared to spend the next thirty years promoting theirs?

Julia McCready - 2013-04-30 00:21

Although you used a direct quote here, I’m not sure it means what you think it does. My point was that the Pioneers canot live forever, therefore, their unwillingness to share power may ultimately be the undoing of the place they love. By the time they are gone, many folks will have grown weary of the battle and ceased to care at all. Who will have the knowledge to make it all work then?

hecker - 2013-04-30 02:42

Thanks for the clarification. You’re right, I hijacked your quote a bit to make my own point. Speaking to your point, that’s related to a comment I made previously re Symphony Woods in particular: That trying to preserve it unaltered was ultimately going to doom it, because a subsequent generation would see it as just an unused treed plot and wouldn’t have any real connection to it–it might as well be sold by CA, clear-cut, and turned into condos or parking for Merriweather for all they’d care.

Jessie Newburn (@JessieX) - 2013-05-06 19:03

But Pioneers (the Silent Gen) VOTE! They vote-vote-vote. That’s why, even as the smallest of four generations, and the oldest (natch), they still carry weight. I personally think one of the most significant issues is that people care about the community in which they live, and most people don’t *understand* what Columbia and CA is, nor the villages, and therefore, don’t know to care enough to participate in leadership opps or to vote.

The blog post announcing the new edition of the index claims that “regulatory freedom in particular is associated with states‘ growth in personal income,” but that analysis is apparently part of the full book-length edition not yet released. In the meantime I’m interested in a separate question at the heart of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians project, namely whether increased economic freedom makes a positive difference to the poorest members of society, as BHLers suggest, or whether “economic freedom” is really just a code word for policies that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, as many progressives suggest. The folks at the Mercatus Center were nice enough to release the data on which the rankings are based, so I can use that data to start exploring the question.

I should stop here and note that there are people far more competent than me to do this sort of analysis; however I think it’s important not to be intimidated by issues involving numbers and statistics, and I encourage others to take the same attitude. In support of my novice attempt I’ve created a Google spreadsheet containing the following variables of interest: the Mercatus Center values for economic freedom, fiscal freedom, and regulatory freedom for each of the 50 states in 2009 and 2011, and the percentage of people in each state participating in the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (“food stamps”) in December of 2009 and 2011.¹

I’m choosing SNAP participation as a proxy for poverty because ensuring people have enough to eat would presumably be a goal of any social safety net, no matter how basic. I would include SNAP participation rates for 2007 as well, but my source for the SNAP data doesn’t have percentage figures for that year and I’m too lazy to do the calculations myself.

I’ll assume for the sake of argument that libertarians are correct, and that increased economic freedom should reduce the number of people poor enough that they need food stamps. This might occur in multiple ways: greater economic freedom could produce general prosperity that raises the prospects of the poor as well; some economic freedoms, such as the reduction or elimination of occupation licensing restrictions, could benefit poor people specifically; and greater economic freedom might reduce the extent to which government “crowds out” private initiatives, so that people get fed via charities or support from their extended families and have less need to apply for SNAP.

Now for the analysis of this hypothesis: If you want to follow along at home, download the R statistical package in your preferred version (for WIndows, Mac, or Linux) and install it, and then download my data in comma separated value (CSV) format suitable for loading into R. Start R, go to the directory where you downloaded the data file (in my case /Users/hecker/Downloads on my Mac), and load the data into the variable fs (a “data frame” in R-speak):

> setwd("/Users/hecker/Downloads")
> fs <- read.table("freedom-snap.csv", sep=",", header=TRUE)
> fs
state st econfree2009 regfree2009 fiscfree2009 snappct200912
1         Alabama AL      24.9388     -7.4383       32.377          16.8
2          Alaska AK      -4.8841      8.9700      -13.854          10.2
3         Arizona AZ      14.6838      9.5361        5.148          15.2
...
>

(The sep="," parameter tells R that this is a CSV file, and the header=TRUE parameter tells R to use the text fields in the first line of the file as names for the columns.)

As a first step in the analysis I’ll use the plot() function to plot the values of fs$snappct201112 (the percentage of the population in each state receiving food stamps in December 2011) against the values of fs$econfree2011 (the Mercatus economic freedom value for each state in 2011):

> plot(fs$econfree2011,fs$snappct201112)
>

R can generate very professional-looking plots but in this case I don’t need the frills, just the following simple but nonetheless useful scatter plot:

(If you’d like you can click on the graph to see a larger version.)

At least at first glance there doesn’t appear to be any relationship between the level of economic freedom in each state and the percentage of that state’s population poor enough to be using food stamps. But I have a powerful statistical package at my service, so I’ll do a little more work. In particular, I can compute the correlation coefficient between economic freedom and SNAP participation, a measure of how the two variables are linearly related:

> cor(fs$econfree2011,fs$snappct201112)
[1] 0.03106044
>

Perfect positive correlation would correspond to a correlation coefficient of 1.0; in that case SNAP participation, and thus presumably poverty, would directly increase as economic freedom increases. Perfect negative correlation would correspond to a correlation coefficient of -1.0; in that case SNAP participation, and thus presumably poverty, would directly decrease as economic freedom increases. But in this case the correlation coefficient at 0.031 is very close to zero, so my initial conclusion is that economic freedom, at least as measured by the Mercatus Center, doesn’t appear to make a difference either way.

What about if I measure the correlations with regulatory freedom and fiscal freedom respectively? Here are the results for those calculations:

> cor(fs$regfree2011,fs$snappct201112)
[1] -0.2284056
> cor(fs$fiscfree2011,fs$snappct201112)
[1] 0.1714178
>

Now I see some correlation, although it’s relatively weak: increased regulatory freedom is associated with slightly decreased SNAP participation (slightly less poverty), while increased fiscal freedom is associated with slightly increased SNAP participation (slightly more poverty). Since economic freedom is calculated as the sum of fiscal freedom and regulatory freedom, these effects (if they actually exist) cancel each other out when considering the effects of economic freedom as a whole.

Are the correlations with regulatory freedom and fiscal freedom really significant? There are statistical techniques that can address that question, but I’m not well-versed enough in statistics to do a good job of investigating it. Instead I can get a feel for how fuzzy these correlations are by creating scatter plots as I did with economic freedom above. This time I’ll get a little fancier and put real x and y axis labels on the graph, and use the two-letter state codes to label the points instead of using circles:

> plot(fs$regfree2011,fs$snappct201112,xlab="Regulatory Freedom (2011)",
+   ylab="SNAP Participation Percentage (Dec 2011)",pch=NA_integer_)
> text(fs$regfree2011,fs$snappct201112,labels=fs$st)
>

(The parameter pch=NA_integer_ causes the points to be initially plotted without any symbols displayed, and then the labels=fs$st parameter to the text() function causes the state codes to be plotted where the symbols would normally go.)

Here’s the resulting graph for SNAP participation percentages vs. regulatory freedom:

It looks as if there’s a slight tendency for states with greater regulatory freedom to have fewer people on food stamps, but still the data are all over the map in general.

I’ll do the same sort of graph for fiscal freedom:

> plot(fs$fiscfree2011,fs$snappct201112,xlab="Fiscal Freedom (2011)",
+   ylab="SNAP Participation Percentage (Dec 2011)",pch=NA_integer_)
> text(fs$fiscfree2011,fs$snappct201112,labels=fs$st)
>

Here any correlation is even harder to discern, though if I squint I can see a very slight tendency for states with greater fiscal freedom to have higher rates of SNAP participation.

I can also get a feel for how real these correlations are by looking at data for other years. In this case the only other data I have is for 2009; rather than plot it I’ll go straight to the correlation coefficients:

> cor(fs$econfree2009,fs$snappct200912)
[1] 0.02359412
> cor(fs$regfree2009,fs$snappct200912)
[1] -0.129513
> cor(fs$fiscfree2009,fs$snappct200912)
[1] 0.1000464
>

The correlations here are even smaller than those for 2011, at just over half the size. If I looked at the 2009 data first I’d be inclined to say that there’s almost no correlation at all between regulatory freedom and SNAP participation, and ditto for fiscal freedom. As before, the correlation of SNAP participation with economic freedom (the sum of the two other freedoms) is essentially zero.

To conclude, we have an index of economic freedom that was created through a fairly sophisticated process by an organization motivated to do a good job of it, given its goal to promote the benefits of free markets. And yet according to its own measures increasing the level of economic freedom in a given state seems to produce little if any improvement in the plight of the poor in that state, at least based on one plausible measure of poverty. On the other hand, progressives may be disconcerted as well: the sorts of policies advocated by free market think tanks under the banner of “economic freedom” don’t seem to be making poverty worse either.

Maybe I chose the wrong measure of poverty, or perhaps my amateur analysis is flawed in some other way. What’s the real story? Does economic freedom as measured by the Mercatus Center actually help the poor or not? I’ll leave the task of producing a final answer to that question to wiser heads than mine.

UPDATE: I replaced an incorrect image for the first scatter plot (SNAP participation vs. economic freedom for 2011) with the correct one.

UPDATE 2: I added the line to read the data into a data frame; for some reason this got garbled in the original post.

• “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans” (Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright). An intriguing glimpse into the political preferences of the 1% and above, based on a survey of wealthy individuals in the Chicago area. The results reinforce stereotypes for the most part: Compared to Americans in general, the wealthy put a higher priority on reducing budget deficits, and favor cutting social spending like Social Security, reducing regulations on business, lowering taxes, and so on; they are less supportive of public education and taxpayer-funded national health insurance. However they are in fact concerned about levels of economic inequality and supportive of better wages for lower income Americans, they just don’t believe government can or should do anything about this. The authors conclude: “On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy.” (Note that I found this paper via a post on the political science blog The Monkey Cage.)
• “Why the Rich Don’t Give to Charity” (Ken Stern). Summarizes some studies on charitable giving by the wealthy: The bottom 20% by income give at a rate more than double that of the top 20% by income, despite receiving little or no tax benefits from charitable giving. Wealthy people also give relatively more to universities, arts organizations, and the like: “Of the 50 largest individual gifts to public charities in 2012, . . . [not] a single one . . . went to a social-service organization or to a charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed.” This not necessarily a function of the wealthy being more stingy or less empathetic by nature; some of the difference appears to be driven by the wealthy not having close exposure to the problems of those at the lower end of the income scale: “Wealthy people who lived in homogeneously affluent areas . . . were less generous than comparably wealthy people who lived in more socioeconomically diverse surroundings. It seems that insulation from people in need may dampen the charitable impulse.” (Note that Stern has written a book on US charities, With Charity for All: Why Charities Are Failing and a Better Way to Give. See also my past post on the question of balancing charitable giving with perceived need.)
• “Is Capitalism Moral” (Steven Pearlstein). The core thesis: The recent financial crisis and long-tern trends in income, employment, etc., “are forcing free-market advocates and their allies in the Republican Party to pursue a new strategy. Instead of arguing that free markets are good for you, they’re saying that they’re good—mounting a moral defense of free-market capitalism.” Although it’s an opinion piece, the article is somewhat in the “view from nowhere” mode of critiquing arguments on both sides of the question and urging advocates to do better. Pearlstein’s conclusion: “In our current debate over capitalism, too much attention is focused on whether, how or how much to redistribute the incomes that markets have produced, with too little focus on the institutional arrangements that determine how that income is divided up in the first place.”
• “The Administrative State vs. the Social Insurance State (Jason Brennan). Speaking of institutional arrangements, here’s what seems to be an emerging theme among some people libertarian by nature but also sensitive to considerations of social justice: “We could imagine a political-economic regime in which there is a completely or largely unregulated free market but in which the government taxes people to provide social insurance and some other welfare benefits. On its face, this regime seem much congenial to classical liberalism than a regime that provides no welfare benefits, but which regulates most enterprises, sets prices, controls entry into markets, and imposes licensing rules.” Real-world examples cited include Canada, Denmark, and others that have European-style social welfare and insurance systems but score better than the US on many measures of economic freedom.
• “Return of the Oppressed” (Peter Turchin). A physicist turned social scientist and advocate of “cliodynamics” looks at the history of economic inequality in the US and elsewhere, and sees it being driven by long-term cycles: “Upward trends in variables (for example, economic inequality) alternate with downward trends. And most importantly, the ways in which other parts of the system move can tell us why certain trends periodically reverse themselves. . . . Unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political instability. Governing elites . . . realise that they need to . . . switch to a more co-operative way of governing, if they are to have any hope of preserving the social order.” Turchin sees the present trend in economic inequality peaking around 2020, along with other trends relating to political and social stability: “In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval.”

I usually just post these articles with a minimum of editorial comment, but this time I thought it was worth adding a few of my own thoughts:

The political attitudes of the wealthy as surveyed by Page, et.al., match up pretty closely from what you might conclude reading Wall Street Journal editorials and Heritage Foundation think pieces, or just listening to Mitt Romney’s infamous “47%” remarks. Thinking along Peter Turchin’s lines, it’s easy to see how this could be a self-reinforcing tendency: As more and more income flows to top earners, they will bear an increasingly greater share of the tax burden, and that in turn will lessen their willingness to support government spending on benefits for the poor and middle-class. At the same time the growing social, economic, and geographical isolation of the wealthy will likely lessen support for charitable giving directed at the poor, at least those in the US, whom many see as having it pretty good compared to the rest of the world.

As Pearlstein notes, this will all be accompanied by renewed debate over the moral foundations of capitalism. The second half of the 20th century saw a revival of classic liberal and libertarian political philosophy (e.g., by Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, and—in a more idiosyncratic way—Ayn Rand). This was followed by the revival of free-market politics in the US and elsewhere, with Barry Goldwater as the harbinger and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as the realization, with the last 30 years seeing the working out of the resulting policies. The “bleeding heart libertarian” school of political philosophers, and the idea of promoting the “social insurance state” at the expense of the ”administrative state,” can be seen as an attempt to rework classic liberal and libertarian thought in the face of economic trends that might weaken popular support for the current economic system.

Given structural factors at work in US politics, including the out-sized influence of small states seen in the Senate and the combination of gerrymandering and geographical clustering by party affecting the composition of the House of Representatives, I don’t see any major political shifts happening in the near term. Whether 2020 will mark a turning point, as Peter Turchin thinks, is an open question.

Stan Hecker - 2013-03-23 22:30

Cousin, I KNEW that there was some justice in your kicking my butt on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests a few years ago (more than forty). Incisive post, with insightful links. Thank you, Frank.

hecker - 2013-03-24 12:10

Hey, Stan, thanks for stopping by to read and comment!

A while back I read the essays in the online symposium on John Tomasi’s book Free Market Fairness at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians group blog. I’ve previously noted why I think the book and its topic are important. But what exactly is “free market fairness”? It is Tomasi’s particular take on a broader concept he calls “market democracy”:

Market democracy is a deliberative form of liberalism that is sensitive to the moral insights of libertarianism. Market democracy combines . . . four ideas . . .: (1) capitalistic economic freedoms as vital aspects of liberty, (2) society as a spontaneous order, (3) just and legitimate political institutions as acceptable to all who make their lives among them, and (4) social justice as the ultimate standard of political evaluation. (p. xv)

This paragraph packs a lot into a few words. In this series of blog posts I’ll give my personal thoughts on the idea of market democracy, not as a professional (or even amateur) philosopher or economist, but simply as someone who is interested in this general line of thought and somewhat sympathetic to it. Do not expect sophisticated arguments or penetrating insights; I have many questions and few answers.

The first sentence of the above paragraph situates Tomasi’s project in the general history and taxonomy of political philosophy. The main point of interest to non-philosophers is that there’s actually a common intellectual heritage between political “liberals” in the US sense (i.e., those generally supportive of government and its associated regulatory and redistribution schemes) and those who oppose them and call for less government and freer markets. Tomasi’s goal is to draw upon that common heritage and create a hybrid philosophy that acknowledges the importance of the free market but does not dismiss the concerns of those concerned with “social justice” in the general sense. The first two ideas of market democracy come out of the “classic liberal” and libertarian traditions, and the second two from the “modern” or “high liberal” tradition.

Let’s start with the first component of Tomasi’s concept of market democracy, “capitalistic economic freedoms as vital aspects of liberty.” By this Tomasi means that the freedom to engage in typical capitalist activities—owning private property (including the “means of production”), starting a business, producing products and services and selling them in the market, accumulating wealth as a reward for one’s efforts—should be thought of as equally important as other freedoms, for example the freedom to freely speak one’s mind, to practice a religion (or not worship at all), and so on.

Tomasi and others have crafted sophisticated philosophical arguments as to why economic freedom should be viewed as equally important as freedom of speech, religion, etc. Tomasi in particular sees economic freedom as necessary to support “responsible self-authorship”:

A just society is one whose institutions respect citizens from every social class as free and equal self-governing agents. Market democracy affirms a thick conception of economic freedom . . . as a requirement stemming from its foundational commitment to respect persons as free and equal moral agents: responsible self-authors must be free to make a wide range of decisions in the economic domains of their lives. . . .

To restrict the capacity of people to make economic choices or, worse, to treat their economic activities merely as a means to the social ends of others, would violate the dignity of such persons and so would be to treat them unjustly. (p. 97-98)

Others have created equally sophisticated arguments as to why economic freedoms really aren’t basic. I’m not equipped to adequately evaluate and critique all the philosophical arguments. However I do have some questions as to whether or not most people in practice would see economic freedoms as basic, and thus would treat perceived violations of those freedoms as a moral wrong comparable to violations of other freedoms.

Here I follow the theory of “moral foundations” formulated by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, that “several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of ‘intuitive ethics’,” that people are genetically and culturally predisposed to weight these factors in different ways, and that these different weightings are associated with the “conservative” vs. (modern) “liberal” divide we see in politics. Stated in these terms the overall theory seems plausible to me, even if Haidt and colleagues haven’t (yet) got all the details right.

One of the claimed moral foundations is liberty/oppression, associated with the “feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty.” Ravi Iyer, Haidt, and colleagues recently published research claiming that libertarians form a distinct group from liberals and conservatives in their weighting the liberty/harm moral foundation as of high importance, and weighting other moral foundations low in comparison. Libertarians also show up as a coherent group expressing similar sentiments in other survey-based categorizations such as the Pew Research Political Typology. Clearly we can expect libertarians to value economic freedom and to treat it as a basic freedom. But what about other people?

One way to approach this question is to look at extreme cases in which economic freedoms are egregiously violated. Consider for example the Arab Spring, which most people now think of (if they think of it at all) as a straightforward struggle of people for democracy and against dictatorship, now potentially hijacked by Islamists seeking to translate religious belief into political power. But the original spark of the Arab Spring had nothing to do with promoting democracy or Islam. It was the anger and frustration of Mohamed Bouazizi, “a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, in protest of the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation that he reported was inflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides.” While some of the details of Bouazizi’s story remain fuzzy (was street vending actually illegal, or just obstructed by corrupt police officers in search of bribes? did the official actually slap Bouazizi or not?), there’s no doubt that the root of Bouazizi’s protest was his need and desire to provide for his family through commercial trade, and the perceived obstruction of that quest by agents of the state.

The people of Tunisia responded to Mohamed Bouazizi’s act with protests of their own, which in turn inspired protests in other countries. While the motivations of the protestors differed, a common theme was anger at governments that did not provide economic opportunities for the people subject to their rule. Bouazizi’s story arguably affected the protestors in the same general way that the death of religious martyrs or attacks on civil rights protesters have affected others. Perhaps people see the situations as morally equivalent in some deep way, and perhaps this felt sense of moral equivalence indicates that we should indeed treat economic freedom as equal in importance to other freedoms whose violations we view as morally wrong.

However I think the situation is more complicated than that, because it’s possible that the strong reaction to Bouazizi’s act was based on its invoking multiple moral foundations simultaneously. People might feel outraged because the state committed an act of aggression against him, taking his goods and preventing him from selling them (liberty/oppression moral foundation). However the outrage might also be because the state’s action resulted in Bouazizi not being able to provide for himself and his family (care/harm moral foundation), or because it prevented Bouazizi from reaping the rewards that his work might have earned him in other circumstances (cheating/fairness foundation, with an emphasis on fairness as proportionality of rewards). It’s also possible that the fact that Bouazizi was (allegedly) slapped by a woman added to the outrage felt by those in the male-dominated traditional societies of the Arab world (sanctity/degradation foundation).

One way to unravel this is to imagine hypothetical scenarios in which the effect of the other moral foundations is removed or altered. For example, suppose Mohamed Bouazizi were a prosperous merchant who already owned several successful produce trucks, so that the state’s actions might have mildly impacted his income but not fundamentally threatened his well-being and that of his family. Would thus lessening the relevance of the care/harm foundation decrease the sympathy others would have for Bouazizi and the outrage they might feel? Or suppose that Tunisia’s government were widely perceived as legitimate and its police force free of corruption, and the state’s actions against Bouazizi were based on his violating anti-street vending ordinances that had been duly considered and passed by a democratically-elected legislature. Would some people now see Bouazizi himself as in violation of moral norms, namely those related to the authority/subversion foundation?

The problem here, at least for me, is that a philosophical argument that a freedom is basic (and thus deserving of special protection) will ultimately stand or fall in the world at large on the degree to which a claimed violation of that freedom can be perceived as a moral wrong by the mass of people operating from their different weightings of the various moral foundations. An act that violates all or most of the moral foundations would likely never be seen as moral, while an act that violates none or at most one of the moral foundations could be seen as morally neutral by most of the population. Since different people weight the various moral foundations differently, and since only a small fraction of the population appears to treat the liberty/oppression foundation as primary, I suspect people are inevitably going to disagree on the extent to which restrictions on economic freedom constitute a moral wrong, and hence on whether economic freedom is seen as a basic right.¹

This is particularly true since freedoms are typically thought of as inhering to individuals, and so much economic activity is mediated not through individuals but through collective institutions, most notably corporations. Unfortunately Tomasi doesn’t really address the role of corporations in Free Market Fairness. For example, in the course of claiming that “many life experiences have a moral value that can only be appreciated firsthand,” Tomasi gives the (real-life) example of Amy, “a college dropout who has an entry-level job as a pet groomer,” but who through hard work and savings is able to own her own pet grooming business, Amy’s Pup-in-the-Tub: “What does it mean to Amy to walk into her own shop each morning or, when leaving after a particularly long day, to look back and read her name up on the sign?” (p. 66).

Clearly we can emotionally identify with Amy, just as we can identify with Mohamed Bouazizi, and like Bouazizi’s her experience supports Tomasi’s notion of individuals as responsible self-authors who should enjoy economic freedoms as a basic right. However Tomasi leaves unsaid exactly how the economic freedoms of Amy the individual relate and extend to Amy’s Pup-in-the-Tub the (presumably) incorporated business, and as with Bouazizi’s case it may be worth dissecting the relationship a bit.

Perhaps the fact of incorporation is irrelevant and, to echo Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as a corporation, but only individual men and women, namely Amy in this case. But this approach seems incomplete, since corporations in fact can do things that individuals cannot, such as owning property in perpetuity or taking actions without any particular individual necessarily being liable for those actions. Or perhaps corporations should be treated as persons in their own right, with their own rights to economic freedom (just as, for example, the US Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision held that corporations, unions, and other associations have First Amendment rights to free speech). If so, how does that affect Tomasi’s argument. For example, if I go down to the courthouse and register Philosophical Enterprise XLVII LLC, am I bringing a new moral agent and responsible self-author into the world?

From a moral perspective perhaps Amy’s Pup-in-the-Tub should be seen as simply a extension of Amy herself as its founder and head, just as (for example) Apple the corporation has been seen as an extension of Steve Jobs. If so, what happens when Amy sells the business to someone else (or, in the case of Apple, when Steve Jobs died and Tim Cook took over as CEO)? Are the economic freedoms of the corporation now in the service of the responsible self-authorship of the new management? What about the employees of Amy’s Pup-in-the-Tub (or of Apple)? Should their status as responsible self-authors be taken into account when considering the economic freedoms of the business employing them, or are they simply considered “factors of production” in this context? Is it specifically Amy’s role as owner of Amy’s Pub-in-the-Tub that is important—that the economic freedoms granted to a business are justified as enhancing the responsible self-authorship of its owners? What if Amy sells her business to PetSmart (NASDAQ: PETM) and ownership is dispersed among potentially millions of shareholders, many of whom may hold an ownership position for only brief periods of time?

Note that I’m not arguing that economic freedom should not be a basic right because corporations can do Bad Things. (Some of Elizabeth Anderson’s contribution to the BHL symposium reads this way.) Rather it’s just not clear to me how Tomasi’s argument based on responsible self-authorship extends from the world of individual proprietors and small businesses to the world of large publicly-traded corporations in which ownership is for the most part divorced from management, and those doing the management (especially at senior levels) amount only a small fraction of the total number of employees whose activities provide value to the firm. (Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson make a similar point in their review of Free Market Fairness.)

Where does all this leave me in my personal thinking? Here are my tentative conclusions:

First, I agree with Tomasi that there’s a difference between believing that economic freedom is of equal importance to other freedoms and believing that economic freedom is the most important freedom, or even the only freedom that truly matters. We can be liberals (in the classic sense) without being libertarians.

Second, given (what I believe to be) the evolved and innate nature of much human morality I suspect that most people will judge economic freedom as important to the extent that it supports (or does not conflict with) other moral foundations beyond liberty/oppression, such as preventing harm or ensuring proportionality of rewards. In other words, most people are not libertarians and (in my opinion) are unlikely to ever be so. As a non-libertarian myself I don’t think we have to judge all restrictions on economic freedom as equally bad, to believe (for example) that in a modern democracy the imposition of a particular regulation or an increase in a particular tax rate carries anywhere near the moral weight of what was done to Mohamed Bouazizi.

Finally, although I think the right of people to join together in corporations and other collective organizations (e.g., unions) in pursue of economic goals is an important fundamental right, I don’t think we necessarily have to treat corporations as completely equivalent to individuals in all respects. Absent a more compelling argument (which may exist, for all I know) I think we could legitimately restrict a corporation’s freedom to act, in ways that we might not consider legitimate when applied to individuals.

What I believe we do have to do, however, is to treat economic freedoms with respect, whether we consider them basic or not, and to require reasonable justifications for government actions that would restrict them. Again, we can disagree as to what exactly “reasonable” means in this context, with different people making different arguments as to what restrictions on economic freedoms count as unacceptable. My point is simply that we cannot simply dismiss those who feel their economic freedoms are being violated in various ways, any more than we can dismiss those concerned about their political, religious, or other freedoms.

This completes my thoughts on the first of Tomasi’s core ideas of market democracy; I’ll take up the second idea, society as a spontaneous order, in my next post when (if?) I have time to write it.

It’s the latter possibility that I want to discuss in this post. Unless you’re deeply involved in matters Internet-related you’re probably not aware that there’s a special organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that’s responsible for (among other things) the structure of Internet domain names, including overseeing the organizations that sell domain names and deciding which top-level domains can be used. For some time now ICANN has been expanding the set of top-level domains. Some of these, like .biz, were created to provide an alternative for people who can’t get their preferred .com domain name; others, like .museum, were intended for use by particular types of organizations. (See Wikipedia for the complete list of so-called generic TLDs.)

ICANN is now going through another round of creating new top-level domains, with the aforementioned .blog and .book only two of the almost two thousand (!) possibilities being considered. At first glance this sounds pretty neat: I publish a blog, so I might be interested in having frankhecker.blog; similarly, I’ve published a book, Dividing Howard (shameless plug: all royalties go to the charity Voices for Children), so I might also be interested in having dividinghoward.book. However, .blog and .book are different from current TLDs like .com or .biz; as currently proposed they may not be open to the general public, but instead could be completely controlled by specific companies for their own use, in this case Google for .blog and Amazon for .book. (More correctly, .blog and .book would be controlled by someone; other companies are applying for .blog and book as well, and the right to control these TLDs could end up being auctioned off to the highest bidder.)

So, for example, Dennis “Wordbones” Lane hosts his “Tales of Two Cities” blog on Google’s Blogger service; if Google is able to go through with its plans then Dennis would be able to have his blog available at talesoftwocities.blog. On the other hand I host my blog with Wordpress.com, so frankhecker.blog would be unavailable to me. Of course, if Dennis did use talesoftwocities.blog and became unhappy with Google’s blogging platform, he’d be out of luck; he’d have to put up with Google or find a new domain name.

Similarly, if Amazon gets its way I might be able to have the domain dividinghoward.book go straight to the Amazon page for Dividing Howard, which would certainly be convenient. But the book’s available on Barnes and Noble’s web site as well; I doubt that Amazon’s terms of service would allow me to link to bn.com from dividinghoward.book or otherwise promote non-Amazon outlets for the book. I also doubt that libraries, publishers, or others would be allowed to have .book domain names except at the pleasure of Amazon.

Needless to say, these proposed types of top-level domains (known as closed generic TLDs) are a bit controversial, at least among the relatively small group of people who follow these sorts of things; see for example this cNet story from last year that talks about Amazon’s “power play” in attempting to obtain dozens of generic top-level domains for itself. One common-sense objection makes the analogy to trademarks: Here in the US at least you can’t get a trademark for a generic term; thus, for example, Amazon would never be in a position to tell an independent bookstore that it couldn’t use the word “book” in its name. A counter-argument is that the system of top-level domain names is not analogous to trademarks, and that little or no harm would ensure if Amazon or anyone else got exclusive control of a top-level domain like .book.

Why am I telling you all this now? Because ICANN is currently soliciting public comments on the proposal to allow .book and other closed generic TLDs, and the comment period closes in less than three days (at 7 pm on Thursday, March 7). This issue has been under the radar for the most part, without much public awareness; I wasn’t aware of it until recently, and I happen to work for a company that’s intimately involved in the technical infrastructure of the Internet Domain Name System.

If your opinion is especially strong one way or the other feel free to also write your congressional representative. ICANN ultimately acts only at the pleasure of the US government, which controls it both directly (ICANN is under contract to the Department of Commerce) and indirectly (the US government retains ultimately control of the technical infrastructure that would enable new TLDs like .book to work). But time is short. If you have an opinion on this matter, let them know!

P.S. For more information on the background to all of this, see the ICANN site or the independent newgtldsite.com.

But it’s a simple fact that the public has a limited attention span, and they can be forgiven for thinking that O’Malley’s top priorities right now are things like gun control and repealing the death penalty, given that those have been most in the news with his name attached. I doubt that either of these issues is on the average voter’s top 10 list of critical problems facing Maryland, and so I’m not surprised that voters are lukewarm in their feelings about O’Malley.

The simple fact is that Maryland voters have no desire to see Martin O’Malley run for president in 2016, and nobody else does either. So why spend the next few years polishing his liberal credentials for the benefit of Democratic activists and primary voters? Why not spend the time building a reputation as someone willing to take on hard long-term issues, like growing Maryland’s economy in the coming age of Federal austerity, ensuring that Maryland’s health care system works well as implementation of the Affordable Care Act goes into high gear, and putting the state on a sound financial footing without resorting to excessive taxes or gimmicks like casino expansion?

Unlike Barack Obama, O’Malley doesn’t have the excuse of facing an implacable Republican opposition capable of blocking his political agenda. If a Democratic governor can’t be effective in Maryland, where can they be effective? And though as a registered Democrat it pains me to say this, right now I’d count both Robert McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey (plus Andrew Cuomo on the Democratic side in New York) as doing a better job of actually governing their states than Martin O’Malley.

In the end I signed the petition (with the encouragement of Tom Coale), but I still had some residual concerns about doing so. However Bill’s post has dispelled all of those. In particular he demolishes the argument of two Columbia residents that CA is nothing more than a homeowners association and as such has “no business serving others with our monies” by “[putting] CA’s residents’ property (i.e. Symphony Woods) . . . to the regular service of patrons spanning a widespread geographic area, not just Columbians.” As Bill points out, CA is a tax-exempt organization whose exemption from taxation is specifically conditioned on its “promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community” and making its “common areas or facilities” available “for the use and enjoyment of the general public.”

In other words, Columbia is not and cannot be the equivalent of a gated community operated for the sole benefit of Columbia lien payers. To put it bluntly, Columbians have no business telling me that the decisions of CA are none of my business. As a taxpayer I’m in my own small way having to make up for the lost tax revenues due to CA’s tax-exempt status—and of course I’ll also be helping to pay for any county-funded amenities (like a new library) that might be built to supplement the CA-funded Inner Arbor facilities.

Beyond the legalities, I can’t understand why right-thinking Columbians would want to put up a metaphorical wall around Columbia and Symphony Woods. Even leaving aside the original Columbia vision of diversity and inclusivity, the health and well-being of Columbia as a community, not to mention the value of Columbians’ properties, are ultimately dependent on the ability of Columbia to attract the custom and patronage not just of Columbians, but of residents of the rest of Howard County and central Maryland in general.

As I’ve written before, Symphony Woods is not a remote wilderness to be preserved in a pristine state of nature with minimal human presence, it is a park—and as Columbia’s downtown evolves, it will be very much an urban park—whose continued existence ultimately depends on the benefits it provides to members of the community within which it is situated. Declaring it off-limits to compatible uses like an arts district is a recipe for its long-term decline into irrelevance. As Symphony Woods is to Columbia, so is Columbia to the rest of Howard County. If Columbia can’t evolve to meet the challenges of a new time—or more correctly, if Columbians are unwilling to let it thus evolve—then that’s a recipe for Columbia’s own long-term decline into irrelevance. And as Bill points out, that’s a violation not only of the spirit of Columbia but also of the letter of the law under which Columbia and CA are organized.

Tom Coale - 2013-02-13 13:01

Glad you signed the petition, Frank. The exclusionary insular mindset is the vocal minority. I think most Columbians think a lot more along the lines of what Bill has said.

However I take partial exception to Wordbones’s declaration that this proposal is an example of the dictum “make no little plans.” At its heart the Inner Arbor plan basically involves constructing an office building, a couple of theaters, a parking garage, and some additional indoor and outdoor amenities. It’s big in comparison to what was previously proposed for Symphony Woods, namely a fountain and a small cafe, but it’s fairly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

For an example of truly gonzo development ideas we have to leave present-day Columbia and go elsewhere, in particular to Detroit, the symbol of American urban decay and now the proposed location of the Commonwealth of Belle Isle. Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River currently used as an urban park; at 982 acres it is about 25 times the size of Symphony Woods and almost three times the size of the area covered by the Downtown Columbia plan. Like most of Detroit it’s fallen on hard times, and the city is trying to figure out what to do with it. A local real estate developer, Rodney Lockwood, has offered the city $1 billion to buy the island and develop it. And not just any old development either—Lockwood proposes to turn Belle Isle into a separate 35,000-person “commonwealth” within the United States, with its own independent (and relatively minimal) government, an almost total exemption from Federal taxes, separate citizenship requirements, and eventually its own currency, the Rand.¹

As the name of the currency might have told you, the Commonwealth of Belle Isle is another in a string of proposed schemes to establish a libertarian society free of government meddling and dedicated to the principles of liberty and free enterprise—the successor to (among others) space colonies, seasteading, and the Free State Project. It also has connections with the Charter Cities movement promoted by economist Paul Romer, which in turn was inspired by the real-life examples of city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore.² And of course—though Lockwood goes to some lengths to deny it—the Commonwealth of Belle Isle could also function as an on-shore tax haven, the chilly equivalent of those sunny Caribbean islands where wealthy people park their assets and US corporations establish shell entities to limit their overall corporate tax burden.

An ambitious plan requires an ambitious approach to promote it. The Columbia Association has provided us with a typical slide presentation, while Lockwood has written a 158-page book set 30 years in the future, as a former resident of Detroit returns to marvel at the transformation of Belle Isle and the consequent revitalization of the regional economy. Admittedly it’s not high on drama or conflict; in one fairly typical conversation the two main characters discuss the fine points of Belle Isle’s real estate tax structure (a variant of 19th-century reformer Henry George’s “single tax”). I doubt that Belle Isle the book will achieve the best-seller status of the works of Lockwood’s hero Ayn Rand.³

Lockwood’s book reminds me not so much of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead but rather Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a 19th-century tract-disguised-as-fiction in which the protagonist goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to find it transformed into a socialist paradise.⁴ Bellamy’s book was surprisingly popular; according to Wikipedia, “It was the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. . . . In the United States alone, over 162 ‘Bellamy Clubs’ sprang up to discuss and propagate the book’s ideas.”

All forgotten now, of course, but not written in vain: The ideas of Bellamy and others eventually were toned down, adapted, and transmuted into the welfare-state capitalism of the New Deal and the Great Society, the milieu from which an idealistic real estate developer named James Rouse emerged bearing the dream of a place that would be “not a perfect city or a utopia, but rather an effort to simply develop a better city.” I suspect the libertarian Belle Isle of 2043, like Bellamy’s socialist Boston of 2000, is a fantasy that is doomed to stay within the pages of a book. But although I’ve been a bit snarky about the concept (though not nearly as snarky as some) I’m loath to dismiss or denigrate the spirit behind it.

I think we could use more experiments in urban living and governance, even somewhat oddball ones. Columbia was a noble experiment, though I think ultimately a failed one: In an America in love with suburbia it inevitably assumed a fairly typical suburban character, and (as I’ve written elsewhere) its relative prosperity and socioeconomic equality is arguably less due to its founding ideals and more a function of its role as a bedroom community for an ever-growing Federal government presence in Maryland.

In a sense the Commonwealth of Belle Isle is a 21st century version of Columbia, projected through the lens of a free market ideology. If any part of the Belle Isle vision comes to fruition it’s possible it will simply become a gated community for the 1% and their domestic servants (or “home managers” as the book has it), a supersized and urbanized version of Gibson Island. But who knows? And if Belle Isle does turn out to be more than that perhaps it will hold lessons for the rest of us. At some point in the future Columbia, Howard County, and Maryland may find that Uncle Sam doesn’t come round with presents as often as he used to. In preparation for that day we need more and better ideas on how to promote private sector economic growth, and we shouldn’t be picky on where we look for them. If an idea is a good one then who cares where we steal it from?

• “The Real Republican Adversary? Population Density” (Dave Troy). A Baltimore entrepreneur looks at how population density is associated with (and influences?) Americans’ political choices and beliefs: “98% of the 50 most dense counties voted Obama. 98% of the 50 least dense counties voted for Romney. . . . At about 800 people per square mile, people switch from voting primarily Republican to voting primarily Democratic.” His conclusion: “Density is efficient. Density produces maximum economic output. An America that is not built fundamentally on density and efficiency is not competitive or sustainable. And a Republican party that requires America to grow inefficiently will become extinct.” See also Tim de Chant’s “How population density affected the 2012 presidential election” for (somewhat confusing) paired maps showing population density vs. Obama’s and Romney’s vote totals.¹
• “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities” (Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West).  Providing some scientific underpinnings to Dave Troy’s arguments for cities and higher-density living, Geoffrey West and his colleagues claim that the growth of cities exhibits mathematical regularities and in particular that cities foster increases in innovation at a rate greater than would be expected by looking at their rate of population growth: “Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents, β, that fall into distinct universality classes. Quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation have β ≈1.2 >1 (increasing returns), whereas those accounting for infrastructure display β ≈0.8 <1 (economies of scale).” For a less math-heavy discussion of these ideas see the Edge interview with West.
• “Agenda 21 and You” [PDF] (John Birch Society). One present-day conservative response to calls for higher-density living and “sustainable development”: “The American dream of the beautiful house, big front and back yard, white picket fence, and one to two cars, is to be replaced with the United Nations’ Agenda 21 vision of living in small urban dwelling[s]. . . . As rural areas become less populated, they will become off-limits for people, but not animals and plants, such as weeds. Over time, plants and animals will move in and take over. Grass will grow uncut and grow creeping into sidewalks. . . . These once lively and prosperous communities will become ‘open space.’”
• “Cross of Gold” (William Jennings Bryan). In 1896 the soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee advocates on behalf of rural America:

[We] say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic coast, but the hardy pioneers who have braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—the pioneers away out there [pointing to the west], who rear their children near to Nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their young, churches where they praise their Creator, and cemeteries where rest the ashes of their dead—these people, as we say, are as deserving of the consideration of our party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak. . . . I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”²

• “United States presidential election, 1896” (Wikipedia). “The 1896 campaign is often considered to be a realigning election that ended the old Third Party System and began the Fourth Party System. [Republican candidate William] McKinley forged a coalition in which businessmen, professionals, skilled factory workers, and prosperous farmers were heavily represented. He was strongest in cities and in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast. Bryan was . . . strongest in the South, rural Midwest, and Rocky Mountain states.” Compare the map of electoral results to the Tim de Chant map linked to above.³

Tom - 2012-11-25 19:56

Thank you for this post, Frank. I appreciate the long reads.

hecker - 2012-11-26 04:16

Glad you like it. I’m getting into having a chosen theme for each of these, and plan to continue the practice.

Exiled in Maryland (exiled@home.com) - 2012-11-27 04:22

Rural Americans tend to be seen as generally more self-sufficient whereas city-dwellers are generally those doing most of the consumption of government services and handouts. Of course the more densely populated areas will tend to vote Democrat. That’s where most of the freeloaders live. Romney was exactly right about the 47% and those 47% live in the cities.

hecker - 2012-11-27 14:02

Thanks for stopping by to comment! The question is, is there data to support your assertion? Off the top of my head, I recall data showing that in general rural states receive more in Federal spending (all types) than they contribute in Federal taxes. I’ve also seen stories calming that rural states have a higher proportion of food stamp recipients than urban states. However I don’t expect you to accept this assertion in the absence of actual data, anymore than I’d accept your assertion without some evidence to back it up. When I have time I’ll try to track some relevant data sources down and do a post on this. In the meantime if you have links to applicable data please feel free to post them in a comment and I’ll check them out.

• “Building a bigger GOP” (Jennifer Rubin). “The enormous presidential electorate isn’t hopeless. Half have managed to retain traditional values and some basic economic and historical knowledge. . . . Before conservatives give up on the rest they should try talking with them, not at them, to explain their ideas and dispel the pervasive liberal tropes about conservatives and conservatism.” (Via BillBissenas)
• “The Party’s Problem” (Ramesh Ponnuru). In contrast to Rubin, Ponnuru notes that “Better ‘communications skills,’ that perennial item on the wish list of losing parties, will achieve little if the party does not have an appealing agenda to communicate.” He concludes, “America is . . . a country that has strong conservative impulses: skepticism of government, respect for religion, concern for the family. What the country does not have is a center-right party that explains how to act on these impulses to improve the national condition.”

Speaking of the national condition, I’ve previously linked to Race Against the Machine, a book discussing the possibility of advanced computer software taking over many if not most of the work currently performed by white-collar workers. This is an explicit goal of leading technology VCs (see for example Marc Andreessen’s “Why Software is Eating the World”) and a number of people have been thinking of the implications of such a development for the economy and society were it to occur. Here are two more examples:

• “The Lights in the Tunnel” (Brad Feld). A venture capitalist’s brief review of the book of the same name by Martin Ford: “Ford starts by asserting [his underlying] mental model—that in the future 75% unemployment will permanently exist because jobs will have been automated away—and they will not be replaceable. . . . Ford asks rhetorically ‘Is it possible to have a prosperous economy and a civil society in such a scenario?’ (answer = yes and he’s going to propose a way to do it.)” See also Ford’s response.
• “Beyond a Jobless Recovery” (Paul Fernhout). “[The] link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. . . . It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society.”

Finally, reading about science and writing about the same:

• The Eighth Day of Creation (Horace Freeland Judson). If James Watson’s book The Double Helix is a blog post—brief, brash, and biased—then this is a New Yorker article: a comprehensive, factually accurate, and gracefully written account of the development of molecular biology from the discovery of the structure of DNA through the cracking of the genetic code that translates DNA into RNA and then into proteins.
• “The Sense of Style: Scientific Communication for the 21st Century” (Steven Pinker). Despite the title, this is of interest to anyone writing for the general public, whether in blogs or formal articles. I don’t normally watch one hour videos online, but this was time very well spent; I’m looking forward to the book. (Via Carl Zimmer)

Tom Coale highlighted the bizarre shapes of the proposed districts, a byproduct of the legislature’s attempt to artificially create safe Democratic seats even if the districts make no sense from the perspective of geography and current political boundaries. A former Congressional staffer quoted by Tom noted that gerrymandering of this sort helps produce political polarization, makes Representatives more remote from their constituents, and in particular harms the interests of Howard County by splitting it between three separate Congressional districts. I’m a registered Democrat myself, but in this post I’ll make the case that the redistricting measure, even though created by Democratic politicians and activists, is actually harmful to the long-term interests of the Democratic party and the people and principles it purports to represent.

But how can this be? Isn’t the goal to elect more Democratic candidates and to defeat “Team Red”? Wasn’t opposition to this redistricting measure led by Republicans, who are responsible for Question 5 being on the ballot in the first place? Yes, that’s right. But just because Republicans oppose the new redistricting measure doesn’t mean that we as Democrats are duty-bound to support it. If the Devil gives you advice you might question his motives, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad advice; you owe it yourself to think on the subject and come to your own conclusions. So without further ado here’s my take on the case for voting NO on Question 5:

The current redistricting measure will produce Democratic candidates who are more ideologically out of sync with the typical voter, and less likely to appeal to them in the long term. If general elections become uncompetitive due to gerrymandering then the Democratic primaries will determine who gets elected. Since voters in Democratic primaries are more likely to be Democratic party activists and other strongly-partisan Democrats, the Democratic candidates who will be successful will be those who appeal to strong partisans and not necessarily those who appeal to the typical voter. This is sowing the seeds of long-term problems, for a variety of reasons:

• When elected officials owe their election to a relatively small group of Democratic activists, they prioritize the interests of those people over the interests of Democratic voters in general and the public at large. This can produce policies that appeal to special interests and ideological pressure groups but can be distasteful or even harmful to the rest of the electorate. (See my post on gerrymandering in Howard County Council elections for a more lengthy discussion of this point.)
• Not all elections can be gerrymandered. Extremely liberal Democratic candidates who are successful in district-based Congressional elections may struggle when trying to compete in statewide elections for governor or the US Senate (or, for that matter, in Presidential elections, should it ever come to that).
• The Democratic party depends much more than the Republican party on its ability to build a broad coalition of voters who may belong to different ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic groups. Giving a small fraction of Democratic voters the effective power to determine Democratic candidates and policies makes it more difficult to hold that coalition together over time.

The current redistricting measure will make it more difficult to replace mediocre, incompetent, or even corrupt Democratic elected officials with more effective Democratic candidates. The Democratic party doesn’t exist to provide sinecures for Democratic party leaders and activists, it exists to further Democratic party principles. No one, no matter how long their service to the party, has an inalienable right to lifelong employment as an elected official. Gerrymandering that creates safe Democratic seats also makes it more difficult to replace candidates who have passed their “sell-by date” with others who could better represent the party and appeal to a broader base of voters.

In cases where Republicans do get elected, they will be more ideologically polarized and less willing to work with Democratic elected officials to advance initiatives that would help both Democrats and Republicans. This is the flip side of the problem I mentioned above: When Republicans get disproportionately gerrymandered into certain districts in order to improve Democratic chances elsewhere, those districts can end up being the mirror of “safe” Democratic districts, electing Republicans candidates who owe their electoral success in appealing to the most conservative and partisan GOP primary voters. If Democrats ever need the help of such Republicans in advancing bipartisan initiatives they’ll likely find them unwilling to cooperate.

As a result of the effects above, the current redistricting measure will increase voters’ cynicism about government and decrease their willingness to support worthy government initiatives. This serves the long-term interests of the Republican party, which explicitly promotes itself as the opponent of government. However this is absolute poison to the goals of the Democratic party, which seeks to use government as a vehicle to promote the public interest and safeguard the interests of the most vulnerable members of society.

If voters ultimately get fed up with the consequences of partisan gerrymandering, they may adopt measures that are even more destructive of Democratic interests and more difficult to reverse. Draconian term limits for elected officials? Supermajority requirements for raising taxes? The continual use of ballot initiatives to attempt to micro-manage legislators? All consequences of an electorate that thinks politicians are unresponsive to their needs, is looking for any way to correct the problem, and is susceptible to those pushing simple-sounding cures that in many cases end up making the disease worse rather than better. (See California for a good example of this dynamic.)

Finally, rejecting the current redistricting measure may improve the future chances of adopting redistricting schemes that are more non-partisan and could moderate the excesses of partisan gerrymandering. If the redistricting measure is rejected then it will go back to the Maryland state legislature, which will likely make some relatively cosmetic changes and then approve it again. So the short-term impact of rejecting the measure will be relatively minor. However if Question 5 goes down to defeat then at least it will show that there is popular support for an alternative to the present system, and those promoting such alternatives may be able to build on that support to get future measures on the ballot to change the way redistricting is done.

As they say, every journey begins with a single step, and I think rejecting the legislature’s redistricting measure is a useful first step on the journey to a more effective and responsive Democratic party that better serves the interests of all Marylanders. I hope you’ll join me on that journey by voting NO on Question 5.

First and foremost is that if political attitudes are in fact significantly genetically influenced then political differences among people are inevitable. We will never convince our political opponents to agree with our positions starting from our own moral intuitions. It’s likely that the best we can do instead is to manage our political differences within a framework like representative democracy (“the worst form of government, except for all the others”) that can provide some assurance that the public good will be advanced, that winners of political contests will need to come back again to the voters at some point, and that losers of those contests will have another chance to be winners.¹

If we can’t compel our political opponents into agreement based on our own premises and the force of our logic, how can we find any common ground at all, and any room for compromise? One approach is to accept that our own reasoning on political, moral, and related issues is often more rationalization of our existing biases than a disinterested search for truth, and to find ways to counter that affect. For example, we might grant that our opponents might actually have good reasons for having the positions they do, and seek to explore what those reasons are and what they imply. We might then use argument constructively, as a way to test the flaws in our own thinking and reason with others to come up with better solutions than we might discover on our own.²

But maybe some people don’t want to do that. Maybe they want to crush their political opponents like bugs and grind them into the dust—in other words, they’ll pursue the dream of the “permanent majority.” The problem, as noted in my previous post, is that although ideological stances (e.g., “conservative” or “liberal”) may be heritable, party affiliation is not; there are no “born Democrats” or “born Republicans.” Political parties are simply alliances of convenience formed to win and wield political power, and if a party finds itself consistently losing at the ballot box then it is free to redefine itself in a way so as to attract more voters. For example, a perpetually-losing Republican party could work to widen its appeal to non-white ethnic groups, while a perpetually-losing Democratic party could incrementally change its social or economic policies to peel off a fraction of social conservatives or libertarians currently voting for Republican candidates.

Party flexibility is especially important in the US because for structural reasons it has only two dominant parties, and not everyone neatly sorts into the “liberal” and “conservative” buckets. In particular libertarians at least constitute a separate group in terms of their moral intuitions and other biases (see for example a study of libertarian psychology led by Ravi Iyer, a colleague of Jonathan Haidt), and some divide the electorate into even more groups based on their political attitudes. (For example, the Pew Political Typology divides US voters into nine separate groups.³)

The two-party system in the US thus doesn’t necessarily match up well with the actual attitudes of voters. This is probably a major reason why the group of nominally “independent” voters is growing—people who often lean toward one party or the other based on some shared attitudes or tactical considerations but who are not willing to wholly identify with a party. There are other ways to structure political institutions (for example, parliamentary systems) that are not as prone to two-party dominance, and other ways to run elections (for example, the single transferable vote and other forms of proportional representation) that can better reflect voter’s preferences. However they’re unlikely to be adopted in the US.

How then will politics evolve in the US? Are we doomed to continued political polarization and elections cast as battles between good and evil? I can think of at least two possibilities. The first (touched on by Karl Zimmerman in his comment on Razib Khan’s post) is that Americans will self-sort into different states and other geographical areas by political disposition, and this tendency will then be reinforced by so-called assortative mating (e.g., conservatives marrying conservatives) and heritability of political attitudes (e.g., liberal parents having children predisposed to liberal attitudes).

The result would be a nation of “one-party states” within which politics could proceed based on a rough shared consensus on values, with intra-party factionalism taking the place of inter-party competition. There would still be gridlock at the national level, but the self-interest of states (particularly large prosperous ones whose residents contribute more in Federal taxes than they get back in Federal spending) might force a return to a more federal system, with the states taking over more functions of government and the level of Federal taxes and spending decreasing.

Another possibility is hinted at by one of the findings of the paper, namely that estimated heritability for various political attitudes decreased to almost zero in populations that had suffered major financial losses or gone through other life crises—in other words, any genetic predispositions present apparently didn’t affect those people’s attitudes in practice.

We can flip this around: It’s possible that the past several decades of relative peace and prosperity have affected political attitudes like the past century of improved nutrition has affected height, reducing the influence of environmental factors and increasing the influence of genetic predispositions—in effect allowing us the luxury of indulging in our own in-born ideological biases. At present the state of the economy is a bone of partisan contention, but perhaps if the present economic crisis lengthens and deepens (no matter which party is in power) then Americans will look past their innate moral intuitions a bit and unite in an attempt to do something about it.

Or perhaps not, in which case it would still behoove us to stop sometimes and try to look at things from our opponents’ point of view.

Let’s start with the opposite ends of the spectrum. Per figure 1 in the paper (see Razib Khan’s post for a more readable version) some of the most heritable traits include having an interest in politics, voting and otherwise participating in politics, identifying as liberal or conservative, and political knowledge and sophistication in general. On the other hand the least heritable trait was party affiliation, which appeared to be much more influenced by one’s family and other shared environment. How can we reconcile this?

I haven’t read the referenced papers showing these results, but my off-the-cuff thought is that the more heritable traits are those related to underlying traits that are themselves fairly heritable, most notably innate moral intuitions (which could influence liberal vs. conservative leanings—see below for more on this) and general intelligence (which could influence the extent of one’s political knowledge and sophistication). On the other hand actual party affiliation is much more influenced by one’s family or close associates: We all know people who take their cues on which party and candidates to support from their spouses, parents, or friends; in some cases they may have minimal interest in politics, while in other cases they may simply “go along to get along” when it comes to publicly affiliating with a political party.

This relates to another finding reviewed in the paper (see figure 2), namely that “genetic influences on attitudes are expressed only when powerful social pressures, such as the parental environment, are no longer present. . . . Starting at age 21, . . . ideology emerges as being genetically influenced.” In other words, while children are most subject to the influence of their parents they are likely to mimic both the parents’ party affiliations and ideological beliefs (e.g., identifying as a liberal or conservative), independent of any genetic factors. (For example, the children may be adopted or have a stepparent.) However once children are fully independent their ideological beliefs shift to be more influenced by genetic factors, even as they may retain their parents’ party affiliation.

Let’s go back to the general question of why political attitudes might be genetically influenced (to greater or less degrees). As noted in the paper, presumably this is because present political issues relate to situations humans encountered in their long evolutionary history as social animals: under what circumstances should people cooperate, how should people balance the threats and opportunities inherent in encounters with others, how to reconcile personal desires with the demands of a social dominance hierarchy, and so on.

Although it’s not referenced by the paper, one way to look at this is through the “moral foundations” theory promoted by psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues (and popularized by Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind). The basic idea is that political attitudes ultimately rest on several “innate and universally available psychological systems” (the “foundations”) that people consider to be of more or less importance, and that these foundations are themselves genetically influenced as a result of human evolution.¹

For example, in relation to the “fairness/cheating” foundation some people strongly believe individuals should and do get what they deserve (“fairness as proportionality”) while others are more concerned that everyone share with each other (“fairness as equality”). Looking back this connects to theories on how humans evolved to cooperate with one another: Those who cooperate realize mutual advantages, but in a society dominated by cooperators there are also advantages to exploiting others’ generosity; in response cooperators would benefit by evolving propensities to search for and punish instances of free riding. In the present day this influences political attitudes toward “welfare” as a general concept.

Similarly, attitudes around group loyalty and betrayal hark back to the need of groups to protect against attacks by other groups, a need that was balanced against the advantages (e.g., from trade) of interacting with others. In the present day these attitudes influence people’s positions on such issues as immigration, foreign policy, multiculturalism, and the like. Note that this doesn’t mean that loyalty to one’s group automatically translates into opposition to “out-groups.” It’s more that greater or lesser genetic predispositions to in-group loyalty combine with social learning (e.g., who’s in your group and who’s not) and particular circumstances (e.g., regional or national economic conditions) to influence an individual’s position on a particular issue (e.g., amnesty for illegal immigrants who are long-time US residents).

I could continue with more examples, but this is a good place for me to stop and formulate some final thoughts on the implications of all this. More on that in part 3.

Note that this is a review paper; it doesn’t present any new results, but simply summarizes previous research in the field. The significance of the paper is rather that the possibility of genetic influence on political attitudes isn’t a new idea sprung on an unsuspecting world. There’s been enough work done in this field over the years, and enough interesting results, to make it worth summarizing the research and collecting all the references.

The interest comes from the fact that there’s now a large body of evidence that genetic differences among people account for a good deal of the differences in the various political attitudes that people have. Figure 1 of the paper (available at the above link to the paper’s abstract or at Khan’s post) shows this graphically, displaying estimates of the relative proportion of variation in political attitudes attributable to genetic factors, shared environment (basically, the family environment), and nonshared environment (basically, anything else other than genetic factors and the family environment).

It’s worth my explaining a bit about how these sorts of estimates are made and what they do and don’t mean. The relevant term of art is “heritability”: An attitude, behavior, or other trait (e.g., height) is heritable in a particular population (e.g., all US adults) to the extent that the variation in the trait within the population is due to variation in the genetic makeup of that population. So, for example, according to the graph referenced above whether people identify as liberal or conservative is estimated to have a heritability of almost 0.6, meaning that almost 60% of the variation in how people identify (within whatever population was surveyed) is estimated as being due to differences in their genetic makeup.

Making such estimates requires measuring both how people’s attitudes vary in a given population and how their genetic makeup varies. The first task can be done through polling and similar measures. The second task has traditionally been harder, as until relatively recently there’s been no direct way to compare genetic makeups between individuals. This will become much easier in the future as genome sequencing becomes much cheaper and genetic sequences between individuals within a population can be directly compared.

In the meantime researchers have used various indirect techniques, including comparing trait variations between people who are identical twins (and thus share all of their genes) relative to variations between people who are fraternal twins (who on average share only 50% of their genes). For example, if identical twins tend to both identify as liberal significantly more often than do fraternal twins then that’s an indication that this trait is likely genetically influenced to some extent.²

Some other clarifications:

• A trait being heritable is not the same as its being genetically determined. Just because a trait is genetically influenced doesn’t mean that it’s going to manifest itself in the same way or to the same degree in individuals with similar genetic makeups; environmental factors also can play a significant role in this. Also, some traits, like having five fingers or toes, are determined by genes but are not heritable in the strict sense because they don’t vary among people.
• A heritability estimate is associated with a population, not an individual. Thus, for example, the almost 0.6 heritability estimate for identifying as liberal or conservative does not mean that the child of two liberals has an almost 60% chance of being a liberal themselves.
• Because heritability is associated with a population, two populations can have different heritability estimates. For example, it’s possible that the heritability of (say) authoritarian attitudes could be different in the US than in other countries.
• Heritability estimates can also change over time. In particular, as environmental variation affecting a trait goes down we’d expect heritability (i.e., the proportion of trait variation due to genetic variation) to go up. A good example is height: Because developed countries have greatly reduced the incidence of malnutrition, diseases, and other environmental factors influencing height and related physical conditions, most of the variation in height in such countries now reflects genetic variation as opposed to environmental variation. (I’ll come back to this point later as it relates to political attitudes.)
• Finally, a trait X being heritable does not mean that there is a “gene for X.” Thus, for example, there is not necessarily a “liberal gene” or “conservative gene.” Instead it’s possible that a given trait is influenced by hundreds or even thousands of genes, each having a very small effect; this is apparently the case for height, and possibly also for many other traits as well, including political attitudes,

But enough preliminaries—in part 2 I’ll comment on some of the findings discussed in the review paper.

This thought was prompted by a blog post touching on “participatory budgeting,” a movement that started in Brazil and has since spread to other jurisdictions in Latin America and elsewhere. To quote from the PB home site,

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. Most examples involve city governments that have opened up decisions around municipal budgets, such as overall priorities and choice of new investments, to citizen assemblies.

See the blog post “How to Start Participatory Budgeting in Your City” for a good explanation of how it works in practice.

Some thoughts I had after reading these posts:

• It’s no accident that this movement started in a developing country, and in particular in Brazil, one of the key rising nations in the world (along with China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and perhaps a couple others). We worry in the US that we have too much government. However the problem in most countries is not too much government, rather it’s corrupt and/or ineffective government. One of the selling points of PB is that it makes governments more responsive to citizens while at the same time increasing citizens’ sense of ownership in and trust of governments. It’s also no accident that this started as a local government initiative. Local governments touch citizens most directly, and also provide the most opportunities for citizens to make a real difference.
• Note the discussion of PB as a driver of increased tax compliance: citizens see where their tax money is going and have some influence over how it’s spent, so they’re more willing to pay taxes in the first place. Even if you don’t like taxes as a matter of principle, this is an unmitigated good thing: Widespread tax evasion forces governments to raise nominal tax rates in order to fund a given amount of government services, and also induces them to impose harsh measures to force compliance. Higher rates discourage entrepreneurial activity and fall most severely on those who are honest, while encouraging the less honest to participate in a culture of corruption around tax evasion: bribing tax officers, hiding assets or moving them out of the country, selling on the black market, and so on.
• Doing PB right requires making a major investment in encouraging citizen participation, including moving beyond the traditional “let’s have a hearing somewhere and announce it in the newspaper” approach, in which special interests and dedicated activists often dominate the agenda. Contrary to what many might think, local governments in developing countries may well be better positioned to do that than local governments in the US, since many developing countries are much more innovative than the US in terms of exploiting mobile devices and applications, a key driver in reaching people where they are. But at the same time even low-tech measures can do the job: In Brazil they painted budget numbers on the walls of buildings to educate passers-by. (As a local analogy, think of Howard County putting budget visualizations and questions for citizens on the advertising signs in the Mall at Columbia.)

I’ll close with a final thought, prompted by this quote from one of the posts I referenced above:

“This all goes to show that innovations in open government go both ways, from developing to developed countries. . . . The fact that people are not blogging about it in English does not mean that it does not exist. Sometimes people are just too busy making it happen.”

There’s a lot of talk about “American exceptionalism” that often obscures the fact that many Americans (and American politicians) are fairly clueless about what goes on in the rest of the world, and believe the US must inevitably be “number 1” in anything that matters. It’s not unpatriotic to point out that the reality is often quite different. If participatory budgeting ever comes to Howard County, the affluent home of “good government,” it will be because struggling jurisdictions in the “third world” showed the way.

In particular I wanted to note the following points:

First, moving to electronic voting machines and (possibly in the future) online voting opens up many new possible problems (not necessarily fraud-related) arising from bugs in voting hardware and related software. As the saying goes, “To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer.” Voting software bugs can cause hundreds or even thousands of votes to be lost or miscounted (as in one of the examples cited in the report).

Second, for those who want to commit voting fraud, electronic voting provides new opportunities for tampering with votes that are potentially much more effective than having people commit fraud in person (e.g., by voting at multiple polling places, voting as someone else who’s died, or otherwise misrepresenting themselves). Again, the rule of thumb is that human fraud is typically small-scale, while electronic fraud can be an order of magnitude larger.

An example in an unrelated area: You may see from time to time news reports about someone trying (and typically failing) to rob a local bank. This is a high-risk low-reward crime: Most bank robberies are for relatively small accounts, and most bank robbers get caught. A much more serious problem today is criminals taking over the computers of financial personnel at small businesses or government agencies (typically by sending them specially crafted emails containing links to malicious web sites or virus-infected documents) and then generating fraudulent bank transactions that end up transferring money to the criminals. The risk is very low (the criminals are typically based overseas and rarely apprehended or even identified) and a typical crime nets tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. (See the blog of Brian Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter, for some eye-opening stories about this sort of thing.¹)

Finally, for a state that has a lot of resident security professionals and aspirations to be the “Silicon Valley of cybersecurity,” Maryland has at best done a mediocre job of securing its voting machines and associated processes; in the report it was put into the “needs improvement” category overall. In particular, Maryland voting machines do not keep an independent record of votes cast, and therefore cannot be audited post-election to determine whether votes were lost, recorded for the wrong candidates, or fraudulently altered; this lack earned the state an “inadequate” rating in two categories.

It seems to me that ensuring the integrity of the electoral process is a core function of government if anything is. I therefore call on any of you interested in this topic, no matter your party, to read the report and consider how we could get the identified issues addressed in time for future election cycles.

As Tomasi himself notes in the book, political philosophy is not like mathematics, an exercise in pure thought divorced from everyday considerations. Politics is the mechanism by which some individuals and groups acquire and exercise power over others in pursuit of their own interests. Political philosophy in some sense is then just a special case of the general contention that we reason not to discover truth but in order to convince others: Its goal is to furnish plausible arguments as to why the institutions of society should be arranged to some people’s liking and not to others’.

However political philosophy can also serve a higher goal of pointing to more productive and congenial ways of managing those political conflicts that will inevitably arise, and more effective ways of evolving the institutions of society to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”—to quote the Constitution created by politicians influenced by the defunct political philosopher John Locke.

In general I see Free Market Fairness as being written in service of this higher goal, as part of a “research program” (as Tomasi puts it) to explore new and better ways to meet the political, economic, and related challenges of the 21st century. As Thomas P. M. Barnett emphasizes, we are partway through the decades-long project of integrating billions of people into the global economy, raising their standard of living and opening up new opportunities for personal freedom and fulfillment.¹ We also look to technological and economic innovation to help address predicted crises related to climate change and resource depletion, among others. Historically liberal democracies with free market economies have proved best at meeting such challenges, as evidenced by their surviving and thriving while other systems did not.

However such societies face their own internal challenges in mustering the political will and skill to effectively promote globalization and innovation: As more people participate in the global economy, their entry into the labor force supporting globally-integrated supply chains erodes the wage premium that many workers in more developed countries were previously able to command, contributing to stagnation in the growth of those workers’ real incomes. This trend is made worse by technological advances that enable software to increasingly substitute for people, extending the possibility of wage stagnation from unskilled and semi-skilled workers to college-educated middle-class professionals.² Finally, the global economy of “real work” is tied to a complex global financial system prone to periodic crises, crises which further increase the stress and instability placed on the bulk of the population not part of the global economic elite.

These trends imperil the project of innovation-fueled globalization: Why should people support policies that may make the world better in the long run but leave themselves worse off (at least in the short run)? And how should politicians respond to these concerns: With a simple reiteration of the joys of capitalism and a dismissal of concerns about the disruptions the future might bring? Or with a call to slow down or even turn away from globalization and economic growth and innovation? Both of these seem insufficient to the situation in which we find ourselves.

Or perhaps there is another option: Pursue growth, innovation, and globalization through policies that promote a dynamic market economy, but do so in a way that limits the stress placed on those likely to be adversely impacted by the changes associated with such dynamism, and helps ensure that changes in the global economy will benefit the many and not just the few. Free Market Fairness can be seen as providing the philosophical underpinnings for such a project.

In the coming week the folks at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog will be hosting an online symposium on Free Market Fairness. If past experience is any indication they’ll be focusing most closely on the details of Tomasi’s philosophical arguments. If I have time I’ll give my own layperson’s take on Tomasi’s ideas and how likely it is that they’ll have any impact in the real world of politics.

As we saw in the last post, if a bloc of voters exceeds the size of the STV quota (one-sixth of the voters plus one for a five-member council, or 17,001 voters in our example) then they can elect a candidate of their choosing simply by voting for that candidate as their first choice. But what if the bloc of voters is smaller than a quota, and its chosen candidate can’t attract that many first-preference votes? The alternative strategy is simple: If you can’t be the first choice of lots of voters, try to become everybody’s second choice.

Let’s look at an example involving ideological diversity, and in particular the bloc of voters that Pew Research refers to as the “Post-Moderns” in its political typology. Post-Moderns are overall the youngest of the Pew typology groups, are “well-educated and financially comfortable,” “very socially liberal,” “supportive of many aspects of government” but not willing to see it go further into debt to support social programs, and not generally hostile to business or Wall Street.

Post-Moderns comprise only 14% of the electorate and don’t fit neatly into either of the two main parties’ coalitions. In political terms a Post-Modern candidate would likely be either a business-friendly and relatively fiscally conservative Democrat or a socially-liberal Republican who doesn’t display knee-jerk opposition to government or taxes. Either type is rare on the ground nowadays, and would have difficulty surviving a party primary. It’s possible such a candidate would have to come from outside the two main parties, and in the current system would have almost no chance of being elected.

How would such a candidate (call him “Tom C.”) fare in an STV election for Howard County Council? If we assume that Post-Moderns comprise the same proportion of the Howard County electorate as they do nationally, there would be about 14% of voters who might consider voting for Tom C. as their first choice; let’s suppose about 11% actually do so. This would give Tom C. 11,220 first-preference votes (102,000 times 0.11), a respectable showing but well short of the quota of 17,001.

However let’s suppose Tom C. is generally well-known and well-liked in Howard County—serves on boards, supports local charities, is friends with people in both parties, that sort of thing. He can explicitly ask other voters to support him as their second or their choice, even if they’re not willing to name him their first choice.

Suppose he is successful, and is indicated as a second choice by two-thirds of those who give their first-preference votes to three other candidates. Suppose further that all three of those candidates are elected on the first count, each receiving at least 3,000 first-preference votes more than needed to meet the quota of 17,001. Their excess votes would then transfer to other candidates not making the quota.

Since two-thirds of the voters in question named Tom C. as their second choice, he would get 2,000 votes from each of the three winning candidates (two-thirds of 3,000), or 6,000 votes in total. Those 6,000 votes in combination with his own 11,220 first-preference votes would then give him a new total of 17,220, enough to make the quota and become the Howard County Council’s newest member.

Tom C. is thus a “transfer-friendly” candidate, i.e., someone who can be successful in being named as an alternative choice and thus attract transfer votes from more popular candidates. In other countries that use the STV system there are transfer-friendly parties, i.e., minority parties that are not big enough to take control of government but are able to attract enough second-or third-preference votes to enter into coalitions and otherwise exert influence.

This ability of smaller parties and less-popular candidates to be successful is greater the larger the number of candidates being elected. For example, if the Howard County Council were to be expanded from five to seven members (as some have proposed) then under an STV system a candidate could be elected with as little as one-eighth or 12.5% of the total first-preference vote, or even fewer first-preference votes if they could attract transfers. (In our example the quota would be 12,751 instead of 17,001.)

This seems to go against my earlier stated desire to ensure that the council is not selected by a small minority of voters. But remember, I was talking about a small minority being able to determine the majority of the council members; here we’re concerned only with the election of a single council member—though it’s true that in some cases such a single member could be a key swing vote determining the outcome of matters that come before the council.

This is a classic trade-off in politics: is it better to have a diverse group of representatives who have to form coalitions to get anything done (and may sometimes fail to do so) or to have a situation in which a solid and unified majority is free to carry out its plans without significant opposition, but is not necessarily reflective of the true preferences of voters? On balance I think the former is a healthier arrangement. If you agree then you should consider joining with me in looking at the possibility of an STV system for electing the Howard County Council.

TeeJay - 2012-06-07 12:57

Frank, I really enjoyed this series, although I’m at a bit of a loss to see how to bring the STV system to reality in Howard County. Overcoming bureaucratic and voter inertia is, as always, incredibly difficult. It also somehow reminded me of when the Springfield Mensa chapter filled the power vacuum left by a fleeing Mayor Quimby. (Guest appearance by Stephen Hawking!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Saved_Lisa%27s_Brain

hecker - 2012-06-07 13:13

TJ, thanks for stopping by. I think the problem with alternative voting systems in the U.S. is that they’re identified as being something promoted only by geeks or (worse) cranks. But there are places like Ireland (both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) where STV is just the way elections work – nothing esoteric about it at all. I do agree though that the barriers to changing the current system are very high, but it’s not as if Howard County hasn’t changed its council election system before. It all depends on whether there’s a critical mass of people (both voters and politicos) who don’t like the current system and actually want to see a change.

Fortunately I was able to convince myself that STV worked (or at least could work) the way I thought I did. I’m now writing my thoughts down just to make sure—and of course in the hope that others might find this informative.

A good place to start is to think about how an STV election could allocate council seats between Democratic and Republican candidates. Consider again our hypothetical 2014 council election, in which 102,000 voters cast ballots (approximating the turnout in the 2010 council election). Further suppose that 57,000 of those voters are predisposed to vote for Democrats and 45,000 are predisposed to vote for Republicans (approximating the parties’ respective vote totals in the 2010 council election).

If 2014 were a traditional at-large election then the strategy for Democrats would be very simple: field a slate of five candidates and ask Democratic voters (and Democratic-inclined independents) to vote a straight party ticket. If this went according to plan then each of the five Democratic candidates would receive at least 57,000 votes, no Republican candidate would receive more than 45,000 votes, and Democrats would secure a 5-0 county council majority.

Note that it would not matter if Republicans ran one candidate or five in this example; the result would be the same. The only thing that could go wrong for Democrats would be if one of the Democratic candidates were significantly less popular than the others, so that a Republican candidate could sneak through with a victory. This model corresponds to the historical reality of the five at-large council elections held in Howard County through 1982: only in one election (1970) did Democrats fail to achieve 4-1 or 5-0 majorities on the council.

Now instead suppose that the 2014 election were held according to the STV scheme, with a quote of 17,001 votes (one-sixth of the total 102,000 votes, plus one). Now it’s Republicans who have a simple yet effective strategy: First, run only two candidates for county council, say Greg Fox and Robert Flanagan (the top GOP council vote-getter in 2010 other than Fox). Then ask half of the 45,000 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to vote for Greg Fox as their first choice with Flanagan as their second choice, and the other half to vote for Flanagan with Fox as their second choice.

If all went according to plan then Greg Fox would receive 22,500 first-preference votes (45,000 divided by 2) and Robert Flanagan would also receive 22,500 first preference votes. Since 22,500 is greater than the quota of 17,001 both GOP candidates would be elected to the council. Note that this is independent of how the Democratic candidates fare; polling above the quota based on first preference votes results in an automatic win.

However suppose Howard County Republicans instead fielded three candidates, say Greg Fox, Robert Flanagan, and Dennis Schrader, with Fox receiving 18,000 first preference votes, Flanagan 14,000, and Schrader 13,000. In this case only Fox would be automatically elected to the council. Even if all of Fox’s 999 excess votes (18,000 minus 17,001) were transferred to Flanagan (i.e., as Fox voters’ second choice) he would still have only 14,999 votes, well below the quota of 17,001. Assuming that no Democratic voters selected Flanagan or Schrader as alternative choices, both candidates would remain below the quota and would be eliminated, and Democrats would take a 4-1 council majority.

Bad as this might be for the GOP, there’s an even worse scenario, namely that Republican voters split their first choice evenly among Fox, Flanagan, and Schrader, leaving each with 15,000 first preference votes, well below the quota of 17,001. Assuming that no Democratic voters selected a GOP candidate as an alternate choice, all three would be eliminated and Democrats would take a 5-0 council majority.

Note that unlike the effects of gerrymandering under a district scheme, such a result would be a self-inflicted wound resulting from not understanding how STV actually works. The key point is that in an STV election a party should resist fielding more candidates than the number of quotas (i.e., multiples of 17,001 votes in this case) it can reasonably expect to receive as first-preference votes, and should work to as much as possible ensure that those votes are spread evenly across all its candidates.

Thus at 45,000 expected first-preference votes in our example the Republican party has only 2.6 quotas (45,000 divided by 17,001) and should consider fielding no more than two candidates. On the other hand in our example the Democratic party has 3.4 quotas (57,000 divided by 17,0001) and should consider fielding no more than three candidates.

Of course in a given election a party may project it will do better than expected and take a chance on fielding more candidates. It may also in some cases expect to attract transferred votes from one or more of the other party’s candidates, if some voters designate as their second choice (or third, or fourth, or . . .) a candidate of a different party.

Attracting transferred votes is key to another challenge, namely how to get elected as a candidate representing a relatively small voting bloc; I’ll discuss that topic in the conclusion of this two-part post.

The first major advantage is that voters aren’t casting “wasted” votes, like a conservative Republican in District 2 whose vote for the GOP has no effect in practice, or a liberal Democrat in District 5 whose preferred candidate is very likely to lose. In an STV scheme a given level of county-wide support for a party would translate into a roughly corresponding number of seats on the council. (More on this below.)

This proportional representation effect also applies to other voting blocs. For example, if a given demographic group exceeds or is close to 16.7% of all voters and members of that group were willing to make a candidate in their own group either their first or second preference, it’s a pretty good bet that someone from that group would be elected to the council. For example, this applies to African-Americans (17.5% of the population according to US Census data) as well as to Asian-Americans (14.4% of the population).

STV thus offers a way to foster diversity on the council without artificially concentrating minority voters in one district. This is especially important in cases where such voters are not concentrated in one or two areas but rather are spread throughout the county. For example, in the recent round of council redistricting someone (I can’t recall who) complained that in practice black voters outside of District 2 had no opportunity to vote for an African-American candidate with a good chance of being elected. This would not be the case under an STV system.

This same effect works with geographic areas as well. Even in the absence of formal council districts it’s likely that voters in a particular geographic area would preferentially vote for someone from their own area, Columbia voters preferring a Columbia candidate, voters in western Howard preferring someone from that area of the county, and so on. As long as those areas are large enough to provide one or more quotas for candidates it’s likely that we’d see a reasonable degree of geographic diversity on the council.

We’d also avoid cases where voters in a particular area get moved out of their preferred district, as happened with the Wheatfield and Brampton Hills neighborhoods in Ellicott City in the most recent round of council redistricting. Under a county-wide STV scheme those voters could still consider Courtney Watson “their candidate” and make her their first choice in preference to others.

Coming back to the party question, it’s certainly true that STV would make it more likely that Democrats would hold only a 3-2 council majority as opposed to the 4-1 majority of the past few years. If we’re wearing our red or blue spectacles this would certainly be good news for Republicans and bad news for Democrats. But if we take off those spectacles then it’s apparent that voters are more ideologically diverse than the simple Team Red vs. Team Blue distinction would indicate.

For example, a while back I published a blog post about the Political Typology Quiz created by the Pew Research Center, which divides registered voters into eight different ideological groups ranging from 9% to 16% of the voting population. Some of the groups don’t necessarily fit comfortably into the left-right divide, for example the libertarians (10% of voters) and post-moderns (“moderates, but liberal on social issues,” 14% of voters). In an STV system one of those groups (or more likely a combination of them) might have a good shot of getting someone on the council who was more ideologically compatible with that group’s voters than the typical socially conservative Republican or fiscally liberal Democrat.

This all sounds very lovely, but what are the real chances of STV being adopted in Howard County? In the normal course of events, almost zero. The traditional way of doing things is too entrenched and politicians and party activists are too invested in it, especially on the Democratic side where the power to change things mostly resides. But if Calvin Ball and other Democratic politicians want changes to the current system for their own reasons, and are looking to voters to consider changes to the county charter, perhaps that opens up the opportunity to look at other changes that might help balance out the perceived negative effects of increasing term limits.

If so, that moves the chances of a major revamp to the current council district scheme from zero to something at least a tad more than that. And in any case you can’t fault a fellow for trying.

My first proposal is to abandon the use of council districts and return to the days when council candidates ran on a county-wide basis. However we can’t simply return to the old at-large scheme, which had its own problems.

That leads me to my second proposal: Instead of a conventional at-large voting scheme, let’s elect council members using a proportional representation scheme that takes into account voters’ preferences among the candidates and makes it more likely that the composition of the council will truly reflect the composition of the Howard County electorate— ideological, demographic, geographic, and otherwise.

For some reason proportional representation voting schemes have never taken off in the US, but they’re widely used in other countries. The details of the schemes can get a bit complicated, but the basic outline of the scheme I’m suggesting is relatively straightforward:

Rather than voting for up to five county council candidates, a voter would rank candidates in order of preference. In effect each voter would have one vote, which they would give to the candidate who’s their first choice. If that candidate didn’t need that vote to be elected, or if that candidate didn’t receive enough other votes to be elected, then that vote would be transferred to one of that voter’s other choices. (Hence the formal name of this particular scheme: the “single transferable vote” or STV.)

For example, consider a hypothetical 2014 county council race in which all current council members except Courtney Watson (who’s instead running for county executive) are on the ballot in the general election, along with some additional candidates from the two main parties and perhaps from one or more smaller parties.

A liberal Democratic voter in Columbia might vote for Mary Kay Sigaty as his first choice, and then add Calvin Ball, Jennifer Terrasa, and Zaneb Beams as his second, third, and fourth choices respectively, declining to name anyone else. Likewise a conservative Republican in western Howard might vote for Greg Fox as her first choice and then indicate Robert Flanagan as her second choice, stopping at that point. Every other voter would go through a similar exercise, some ranking a full list of five candidates and others expressing preferences for as few as one or two.

When counting the votes we’d start by looking at voters’ first preferences. If any candidates were selected as the first choice of more than one-sixth (16.7%) of those voting then they would be automatically elected. The one-sixth number is chosen to ensure that at most five candidates can be elected, since it’s impossible for six candidates to all receive more than one-sixth of the first preference vote. If we assume that 102,000 people cast valid votes (about the number of people who voted for a county council candidate in 2010) then the minimum number of votes needed to be elected (the so-called ‘quota’) would be 17,001 (102,000 divided by 6, plus 1).

If the first choices of voters in our hypothetical election matched the votes in the 2010 council election exactly then Greg Fox would receive 17,424 first preference votes, 423 votes above the quota, and would be automatically elected. We’d then take Fox’s 423 excess votes and redistribute them to other candidates based on the expressed preferences of the voters for whom Fox was the first choice. For example, suppose Robert Flanagan received 10,427 first preference votes, and 60% of Fox voters indicated Flanagan as their second choice. Flanagan’s vote total would then be increased by 253 votes (423 times 0.6), giving him a new total of 10,680.

Since this would not (yet) be enough for Flanagan to meet the quota, and since in our example none of the remaining candidates met the quota either, we’d eliminate the candidate with the lowest vote total and redistribute their votes. For example, suppose Zaneb Beams received 8,732 votes (same as in 2010), and that that were the lowest vote total of any candidate. Further suppose that 50% of Beams’s voters indicated Mary Kay Sigaty as their second choice. If Sigaty were the first choice of 14,333 voters (matching her performance in 2010) then we’d allocate to her another 4,366 votes (8,732 times 0.5) to give her a new total of 18,699. Since this is above the quota of 17,001, she’d join Greg Fox in being elected to the council, and like Fox would now have excess votes (1,698 to be precise) that could be allocated to other candidates based on the preferences of Sigaty voters.

We’d continue in this manner, redistributing the excess votes of winning candidates and reallocating the votes of the least successful candidates, until all council seats were filled. The details to make the math come out right can get a bit hairy, especially when calculating how votes get transferred in later rounds and having to account for voters who don’t provide a full set of candidate preferences, but that’s what computers and election officials are for. All voters would have to worry about is ranking candidates in order of preference, and that’s pretty straightforward.

But why should we bother going to all this trouble? I’ll address that question in my next post.

I’m less interested in arguing about the merits of term limits and more interested in using this opportunity to put other ideas on the table. In particular, maybe there’s a bargain to be made here: Why not consider extending term limits for council members, but only if this change is accompanied by other charter changes to improve the way council members are elected?

First, let’s ditch the idea of electing council members by district. It’s pretty clear that the process of drawing district lines is broken, and I very much doubt that it can be fixed. As I document in Dividing Howard and has been confirmed in the most recent redistricting effort, the process of drawing council district lines has always been politicized, whether it was done by the council itself as in the early years or by an ostensibly independent redistricting commission as done at present. The commission itself is not truly independent, since its members are nominated by the party central committees and its tie-breaking member is selected by the party holding a council majority. Moreover the council has never been able to resist making further changes to redistricting plans that have already been drawn up based on political considerations.

We could certainly try once again to fix the redistricting process, as I discussed in my post “Can we take the politics out of Howard County Council redistricting?” However as I’ve also discussed (in “Council gerrymandering and the Howard County selectorate”) there are other reasons for avoiding election by districts.

In particular, the smaller size of districts and their dominance by voters of a single party (due both to gerrymandering and geographic clustering of like-minded voters) mean that in practice a council majority could likely be selected based on the votes of a very small group of voters. (I estimated this to be “as few as 9,000-10,000 people, or about 5% of the total number of registered voters in Howard County.”) This is not a healthy state of affairs, as it motivates even the most even-handed politician to unduly favor the coterie of party partisans, local activists, and others primarily responsible for their election, to the detriment of other Howard County voters.

Requiring council members to once again run on a county-wide basis would expand the “selectorate” and help motivate council members to take a more expansive view of who they consider to be their key supporters and constituents. However, as I’ve also discussed (“Should Howard County elect council members at large?”), just going back to the former system of electing council members at large is unlikely to produce any real change in terms of making elections more competitive.

If a conventional at-large scheme is not suitable, what’s the alternative? I’ll address that in my next post.

Bill provided his own answer, which basically amounted to an admonition to “look it up” and a recommendation to read the works of Mark Levin, Thomas Sowell, and Ayn Rand. I was going to provide my own answer in comments, but since it threatened to run long I’m posting it here. Needless to say, this is my own opinion and not an attempt to speak for Bill or anyone else.

If you go by the “ultimate authority” (i.e., Wikipedia), “statism” is simply “a term used by political scientists to describe the belief that, for whatever reason, a government should control either economic or social policy or both to some degree.” However I think in practice a lot of people use the term more loosely than that, to refer more generally to issues relating to the increased power, scope, and actions of government in lots of different areas, and in this context there are several dimensions of “statism” to contemplate.

While these dimensions are interrelated to at least some degree they are not identical, so people can cherry pick from them to suit their own political inclinations and goals. Here (in no particular order) are what I think are the major dimensions along which you could be “statist” (or not, as the case may be):

1. Supporting high (or at least higher) taxes. But you could lower taxes while at the same time raising government spending if you’re willing to run larger deficits (see items 3 and 6 below), like George W. Bush and lots of other politicians (“conservative” or otherwise) past and present.

2. Supporting such measures as warrantless domestic wiretapping and general interception of Internet traffic, attempts to achieve visibility into or even emergency control over private corporate networks, onerous security procedures for air travel, or general surveillance of suspect populations and groups without specific evidence of criminal activity or intent. For the most past these and related measures have had pretty much unanimous cross-party support since 9/11, with no signs of anything changing in the foreseeable future.

3. Supporting lengthy and expensive overseas military engagements and/or military spending that is arguably often in excess of the real needs of national security. See also item 2.

4. Engaging in “nanny-state” paternalism (see Bill’s past comments on Ken Ulman and the smoking ban in Howard County parks) and various types of interference in the private lives of citizens (see Rick Santorum and any number of other social conservatives in the GOP).

5. Promoting government interference in the economy and general market distortions of various types. This is generally considered to be a specialty of Democrats, but is far from unknown among Republicans, especially when done through targeted tax breaks and/or special protections for favored industries (e.g., copyright and other IP-related legislation).

6. Supporting high government spending and tolerating high deficits (which are often but not always associated with high spending). From a “statist” perspective this is considered especially bad if it’s spending on social programs that are at least partially redistributive in nature. Some exempt targeted tax breaks (which either raise taxes on the rest of us or increase deficits) and various corporate subsidies (see item 5) and/or high military and intelligence spending (see items 2 and 3) from being “statist,” although it’s not clear why they should get a pass here.

If you take items 1 through 6 together, I don’t think there’s a major national politician who’s not “statist,” except for Ron Paul. (And I suspect that even Paul has some “statist” tendencies here and there—though Paul supporters are free to disagree.) I suspect almost all (if not all) local Howard County politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, would also fail the “statist” test. In practice “statist” is often just used as a pejorative term for politicians and policies people disagree with—from that point of view it’s basically the new “liberal.”

Some people who use the term “statist” also come to what I think are silly conclusions, for example that Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, etc., are “socialist” countries. Canada actually scores significantly higher than the US on the 2012 Index of Economic Freedom produced by the Heritage Foundation, Denmark is practically tied with the US, and both Finland and Sweden are also ranked in the top 25 countries worldwide. These countries are not “socialist” by any reasonable definition (e.g., government control of the means of production); rather they are simply capitalist countries (some of them more capitalist than the US) that have relatively high spending on social programs.

The bottom line is that I discount anyone who uses the term “statist” unless they happen to be principled libertarians and are consistent in their positions on each of the dimensions of “statism” I’ve outlined above. Which is not to say that I think principled libertarians are always or even mostly right in terms of either their policy prescriptions and how they reach their conclusions, but that’s a subject for another day.

On the other hand, there’s probably been more hype, blather, and outright b******t associated with technology in education than most other subjects. Every new technological innovation with some sort of educational application, from television to social networks, gets hailed as the one true path to revolutionizing education. (For example, I just got the latest issue of Wired magazine, in which a Stanford professor claims that Internet-enabled online learning will lead to there being only ten institutions in the world delivering higher education–all the rest having succumbed to the gale force winds of creative destruction.)

Technologists and entrepreneurs can be the worst offenders here, even more so than politicians, since they typically know much more about technology and business than they do about education. For those folks Audrey Watters, spurred on by Greg Wilson (whom I know from my Mozilla days), has created the “Audrey Test,” or more plainly, “what every techie should know about education.” The first part of it (the “yes/no questions”) is pretty specific to ed-tech entrepreneurs, but the rest of it (the “essay questions”) I think applies to anyone who’s ever been tempted to expound on the topic of technology in education, or on education in general for that matter.

It would be interesting to see how well our various Board of Education candidates would do on this test. Is anyone out there up for the challenge?

Corey Andrews (cacoreya@yahoo.com) - 2012-03-19 19:39

I’m not someone who hails the use of technology… textbooks still get the job done. But I would surely take up the challenge.

hecker - 2012-03-19 22:45

Corey, thanks for stopping by. I too am somewhat of a technology skeptic, having experienced the “hype cycle” from the vendor side (and working in a sales group). It’s interesting you mentioned textbooks. I think the key disruption there is not going to be replacing paper textbooks with electronic textbooks on iPads or whatever, it’s going to be replacing high-cost proprietary textbooks with low-cost freely-available textbooks that have equivalent quality (including alignment with Common Core standards) but can be distributed via print-on-demand for $5 or so a (paper) copy. See my recent blog post in which I referenced the Utah Open Textbook Initiative, which is doing just that. I think it’s worth looking at for potentially significant cost savings when replacing current textbooks (as opposed to just stretching out the replacement cycle from 8 to 9 years, as proposed in the FY2013 budget).

LisaBMrsS - 2012-03-20 00:19

Frank, the Open Textbook Initiative is a very interesting idea. I hope you share it with the Board of Ed via email or public budget hearing testimony.

I’ll leave it to others to comment on the whys and wherefores of Ulman’s decision (except to say that he’s been taking a fair number of politically contentious stands for a man who supposedly wants to be elected governor). I will however note that this is not the first time a county executive has found himself in the middle of controversy relating to Howard County Council redistricting.

To review how we got to where we are: When the election of council members by district was originally approved by Howard County voters the associated charter changes left it up to the council to adopt district boundaries and didn’t explicitly mention a role for the county executive. (The charter also wasn’t explicit on whether districting legislation had to be done via a council bill or a council resolution; see below.) When the first district boundaries were specified (in 1986) J. Hugh Nichols, the county executive at that time, declined to sign the council legislation establishing the district boundaries out of deference to the council’s role.

When redistricting was next done (beginning in 1991, after the 1990 census) the then-county executive, Republican Charles Ecker, was much more involved, making suggestions to the council (which had a 3-2 Democratic majority), submitting his own redistricting plan, and eventually vetoing the plan passed by the council. After a lawsuit and a couple of years of acrimony Ecker signed a compromise plan approved by the council 4-1 with the support of Charles Feaga, one of the two Republican council members.

That traumatic experience led to the creation of a (supposedly) independent redistricting commission to create council district lines. However the way the commission was selected (with members chosen by both parties and a “tie-breaker” member chosen by the council) meant that its decisions would not be free of political controversy, and the associated charter language still allowed for the council to amend the commission’s plan (assuming of course that it could reach agreement on any such changes). In the round of redistricting after the 2000 census the council did indeed amend the commission’s plan (after some intra-party feuding among the council’s 3-2 Democratic majority), and the amended plan was signed into law by James Robey, the county executive at that time.

This round of redistricting was shaping up to be a repeat of the post-2000 round, with the council once again unable to resist the temptation to mess with the commission’s plan, and then finally passing a compromise plan (again accompanied by a split among the Democratic council members). However this time Ken Ulman summoned his inner Chuck Ecker and vetoed the plan. Note that I say “vetoed” rather than the euphemistic “declined to sign” because I believe that under the relevant charter provision (section 209(g)) what Ulman did was strictly speaking a veto (like Chuck Ecker originally and unlike Jim Robey) refused to let the council’s plan go into effect.

Whether this counted as a true veto or not is an interesting question. To quote from the charter:

(g) Executive veto. Upon the passage of any legislation by the Council, with the exception of such measures as may in this Charter be made expressly exempt from the executive veto, the same shall be presented within three calendar days to the County Executive for his or her approval or disapproval, and within ten calendar days after such presentation the County Executive shall return any such legislation to the Council with his or her approval endorsed thereon or with a statement in writing of his or her reasons for not approving the same. Upon approval by the County Executive, any such legislation shall stand enacted. Any such legislation presented to the County Executive and returned with his or her veto may be reconsidered by the Council. The County Executive’s objections shall be entered upon the Journal of the Council, and not later than at its next legislative session, the Council may reconsider the enactment thereof; and if two-thirds of the members of the Council vote in the affirmative, the legislation shall stand enacted. Whenever the County Executive shall fail to return any such legislation within ten days after the date of its presentation to him or her, the Administrator of the Council shall forthwith record the fact of such failure in the Journal and such legislative act shall thereupon stand enacted.

As noted in an earlier Howard County Times story, the redistricting bill was passed by the council on March 5 and presented to Ken Ulman on Tuesday afternoon, March 6. The press release announcing Ulman’s decision states that he “will be returning Council Bill 57-2011 to the County Council on Monday, March 19, unsigned.” and by my reading of 209(g) this constitutes an explicit veto. In general if Ulman in fact does absolutely nothing with respect to a council bill (i.e., if he were to “fail to return any such legislation within ten days after the date of its presentation to him or her”) then the council legislation in question will be automatically enacted.

However . . . in this case things are complicated because the council passed its redistricting bill so close to the March 15 deadline. I’m not 100% sure what would have happened if Ulman had simply sat on the bill and never explicitly returned it unsigned. The bill in question was approved on March 5, but the ten-days allowed for executive consideration actually starts when the bill is “presented . . . to the County Executive for his or her approval or disapproval,” and I’m not sure when exactly that occurred. As noted above Ulman won’t actually return the bill to the council until March 19, so it’s possible that the ten-day window doesn’t expire until then. By my reading of 209(g) the ten-day window for Ulman to sign or veto the bill would end on March 16, after the expiration of the deadline. Since Ulman didn’t actually return the bill on March 15, but merely announced his intention to do so, my opinion is that his action in sending the letter to the council wasn’t a true veto as defined by the charter.

Why didn’t Ulman simply do nothing whatsoever and let the clock run out on its own? Why explicitly return the bill to the council on March 19, given that the March 15 deadline for enactment of a redistricting bill and the March 16 deadline for executive action would have already passed? Perhaps Ulman wanted to avoid any ambiguity over whether or not the council’s plan had been rejected and forestall any possible legal controversies. If anyone reading this knows more about the technicalities or politics around this issue please post something in the comments section.

If the council had gotten its act together earlier then presumably there would have been time for the council to try again to pass an acceptable plan, and if that plan could get approval from at least four council members then Ken Ulman’s veto would have been overridden. By delaying so long the council essentially put Ulman into the driver’s seat when it came to council redistricting.

I should also note that Ken Ulman can thank Chuck Ecker for establishing the precedent that county executives can in fact veto do in fact have legal authority with respect to council-passed redistricting plans. Prior to Ecker’s veto and the subsequent lawsuit it was unclear whether the council could pass a redistricting via a council resolution (which is not subject to the county executive’s veto) or needed to pass it as a bill (which is subject to veto). County Republicans won the lawsuit filed as part of the early 1990s redistricting battle, as the judge in the case held that indeed redistricting plans needed to be enacted via bills, not resolutions.

(However note that per the charter the members of the redistricting commission are to be appointed by a resolution, not a bill, which among other things prevents a county executive of one party from rejecting redistricting commission members appointed by a council majority of another party.)

Finally, some shameless self-promotion: If you’re interested in the back story behind the current round of redistricting and why Howard County does council redistricting the way it does, check out my ebook Dividing Howard: A History of County Council Redistricting in Howard County, Maryland. The book covers all the above topics and lots more besides—it’s essentially a mini-history of Howard County politics from before the founding of Columbia to the early 21st century. To celebrate the conclusion of the current redistricting saga I’m reducing the price of the book to 99 cents; as before, I’m donating all royalties from sales of the book to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in the Howard County Courts.

UPDATE: I’ve revised the section above discussing whether Ulman actions with respect to the redistricting bill constituted a true veto or not.

Sarah - 2012-03-16 10:49

Interesting analysis and fantastic historical perspective. Thanks for this.

hecker - 2012-03-16 13:27

Thanks for the comment, though note that I’m not too confident in the quality of my “analysis”. I’ve already changed my mind once on what exactly went on (and have revised the post accordingly) and may well have to change it again based on input from those more knowledgeable than I.

Kevin Rodkey (kevin.rodkey@gmail.com) - 2012-03-17 01:59

A very interesting post. As one of the Republican appointees to the Redistricting Commission and the only person to attend every Commission public hearing and work-session as well as every County Council hearing and public work-session, I feel like I could write a book on this redistricting cycle. But I probably wouldn’t have your objectivity. I think there were winners and losers with this latest redistricting and Ken Ulman (and to a certain extent Courney Watson) made calculated, self-serving decisions and chose politics over the wishes of Howard County communities. I posted most of this on HoCoRising so I apologize if it’s a breach of etiquette to repost it as a comment on this blog. But here are some of my thoughts on the Ken Ulman’s decision to not sign the Council’s bill. Regardless of whether the Council’s map was truly bipartisan, Ken Ulman is hiding behind a falsehood if he is saying that the Commission’s plan was bipartisan. The Commission was comprised of four Democrats and three Republicans. In the final vote, the three Republicans voted for a map developed by citizen Ray Rankin (not a Commission member but a former Democratic Central Committee member and Democratic appointee to the Howard County Board of Elections). The four Democrats voted for a map submitted by Democratic Commission member David Marker. That map became the map the Commission recommended to the Council. There was nothing bipartisan about the Commission’s map. Ken Ulman should be called to task for the deception in his press release. He said he supported the “map presented by the bi-partisan Commission.” I’m not going to flat-out call Ulman a liar because his press release is too calculated and refined for me to be able to say that honestly. The Commission was in fact bipartisan and the Commission did recommend a map. In a literal sense, his statement is factually correct. Yet, Ulman’s press release creates the impression (or at least invites the inference) that the Commission’s map had bipartisan support. For the reasons stated above, the Commission’s map was not a bipartisan proposal. Is it the first time a politician made a factually correct statement that was also misleading? No. Will it be the last? Certainly not. However, that should not excuse Ulman’s misleading public statement. Moving on to the “communities” aspect of redistricting, my poker face is terrible. However, I can tell you with a straight face that my primary motivation was creating compact and contiguous districts that were substantially equal in population and respected the public testimony. The common theme from all the public testimony was to keep communities together as much as possible. I knew what impact certain moves had on voter registration numbers and where incumbents lived, but that did not trump efforts to keep communities together. (Map 100, the Rt. 1 map, was intended to be a conversation starter about whether Elkridge had more in common with Jessup, Savage, and North Laurel, as several people at the hearing at the Elkridge library stated) Consequently, I take issue with you saying that the talk about “‘splitting’ communities is mostly putting lipstick on a pig.” I also think the residents of Wheatfield and Brampton Hills would take issue with that characterization. It’s an insult to the six months they invested in the redistricting process. They showed up and testified in numbers at the Commission’s public hearing. They wrote the Commission a score of e-mails and showed up at our work-sessions and voting session to show how much they cared. They testified at two separate Council hearings, wrote dozens of e-mails to Council members, and were there for the Council’s public work session and final vote. They then kept up their efforts and urged the County Executive to sign the Council’s bill. It was a sustained, motivated, dedicated, and intelligent effort by those neighborhoods to remain in a district that, frankly, they should have remained in. It’s a shame that the Democrats on the Commission and Ken Ulman didn’t listen to them. Instead of commending those communities for doing everything the way it should be done in our civil society, Ulman turned his back on them. He failed them. There may not have been a perfect map, but the Council’s map was better than the Commission’s map. Elkridge was not going to be happy under either map. At least the Council’s map respected the will of Wheatfield and Brampton Hills as well as Dorsey’s Search. It’s a poor excuse to say that just because not everyone can be happy then no one can be happy. Yet that’s what Courtney Watson appeared to say when she cast her vote against Mary Kay Sigaty’s amendment. This brings me to the significant role that Courtney Watson played in the redistricting process. Whether she intended to side with Ulman over the Wheatfield community or not, her vote against Sigaty’s amendment allowed Ulman to hide behind the “narrow margin” of the Council vote. A 3-2 vote counts as a narrow margin. A 4-1 vote does not. Watson handed Ulman another excuse for rejecting the requests of her own constituents. In the end, Ulman’s official reasons for rejecting the Council’s bill are lacking as his reference to the bipartisan Commission is disingenuous. I think he made a calculated, partisan decision and he chose politics over the wishes of Howard County’s communities.

Kevin Rodkey (kevin.rodkey@gmail.com) - 2012-03-17 02:20

I need to make a correction: I think some of the Council staff, in particular, Theo Wimberly, were also at every Commission and Council meeting. The staff were consummate professionals and a tremendous help throughout the entire process.

hecker - 2012-03-17 02:51

Thanks for the extended comment. I don’t mind you reposting your HCR comment here; I get few enough comments on my blog that I’m happy to share one with Tom :-) For the benefits of others though I do want to note that in your comment “I take issue with you …” the “you” referred to is Tom, not me.

Kevin Rodkey (kevin.rodkey@gmail.com) - 2012-03-19 03:40

Frank - I apologize if I created any confusion. As you correctly pointed out, my post on HCR was in response to Tom Coale. I took a shortcut by using the same post here, in a different context.

My biggest project of 2011 was my finishing my blog series on Howard County Council redistricting and publishing it as an ebook, Dividing Howard. My main goal in doing this was to learn how to create and self-publish an ebook, and having the material mostly already written made it relatively easy to do this; the goal of creating the book also motivated me to finish the series of posts. Given the specialized topic I expected that I’d be able to count the number of copies sold on the fingers of one or two hands, and that expectation has been met: As of today I’ve sold ten copies to people other than myself. Adding to that the three copies I bought myself in order to test the buying process, my total royalties thus far are $26.54; I’ve rounded up and donated $30 to Voices for Children.

As for regular old blogging, in 2011 I did a total of 42 Howard County blog posts (not counting this one), down from 57 in the latter part of 2010 after I started doing Howard County posts. That amounted to one post related to Howard County (even peripherally) every eight or nine days, considerably off last year’s pace of one every four days. My blog traffic was also down from 2010; the average number of views was about 56 views per day, compared to 70 per day in 2010, a 20% decrease. If this trend continues my blog will be attracting only one view a day in 2029.

Here’s a (somewhat selective) list of posts (or groups of posts) I published this year, with additional commentary as appropriate:

• Somewhat ironically for someone who’s not actually a libertarian, I did a number of posts on themes related to libertarianism and the free market, including a rant about Maryland’s discouraging the emerging industry of personal genetic testing, a look at free-market approaches to growing Maryland jobs, and some unsolicited advice to Ken Ulman as he (apparently) prepares to run for governor of Maryland. Widening my scope a bit I also looked at the so-called “bleeding heart libertarians” and the history of liberty.

• Closer to home, I published my somewhat fanciful ideas on reimagining Columbia’s village centers, reported on Chris Leinberger’s talk on walkable urbanism, discussed the old Rouse building as a symbol of Columbia, and pondered the question of whether I should donate to local charities.

• After finishing my history of Howard County Council redistricting I published some further thoughts on the general subject: I wondered what type of government Howard County would have had without Columbia, opined that the Howard County GOP outsmarted itself on council districts, explored why electing council members by one-party-dominated districts can hinder good governing, speculated whether redistricting can be done in a non-partisan way, and discussed whether we should revert to at-large council elections. I also contemplated the curious coincidences between the local elections of 1986 and 2010, and revisited one of my 2010 election predictions.

• Finally, in more personal blogging I bet that I could lose weight using the threat of a Newt Gingrich presidency as a goad (and subsequently lost that bet), plugged my math blog, and re-branded my main blog.

If you have an interest in continuing to read this blog in 2012, remember that you can see new posts as soon as they’re published by using Google Reader (or another RSS reader) to subscribe to the blog’s Howard County-specific RSS feed ([https://frankhecker.com/category/howardcounty/feed/][http]). You can also follow my tumblr if you have an interest in what I’m reading and bookmarking.

In my next post I’ll look forward to 2012 and what blogging-related projects I might undertake in the new year.

HoCo Connect - 2011-12-31 21:04

Look forward to reading your blogs in the new year. You are truly the best researched blogger we have in HoCo.

hecker - 2011-12-31 23:16

Thanks. Unfortunately the amount of research needed limits the number of posts I can do.

As I noted in my discussion of selectorate theory, as a general principle it makes sense to broaden as much as possible the pool of voters who can meaningfully participate in electing leaders, so that those leaders will need to put together winning coalitions that are a significant fraction of the total voting population. Once elected such leaders would then be more likely as a general matter to pursue policies of benefit to everyone and not just to a relatively small band of supporters.

That general principle would lead us to require that a council member attract votes from people all over the county, and not just from those living in a relatively small district. As described in the early chapters of Dividing Howard, Howard County’s first charter required council members to be elected at large (in fact, no other scheme was permitted at the time by Maryland’s constitution), and the first five county council elections (1969, 1970, 1974, 1978, and 1982) were at-large elections.

Why not revert to the original system? There are multiple objections I can think of that need to be addressed. The first objection is that districts are needed to ensure diversity of the council, usually interpreted as racial diversity. This is the same argument recently used in support of the proposal to elect Howard County school board members by districts instead of at large. It’s motivated by the fact that at-large elections have historically been used in many jurisdictions to dilute minority voting power, in particular to ensure (in combination with white bloc voting for white candidates) that no African-American candidates are elected to at-large positions even where African-Americans form a significant portion of the voting population. The question of whether this argument is relevant to Howard County has both a practical and a legal dimension.

Practically speaking I don’t believe that an at-large system would necessarily be disadvantageous to African-American or other minority candidates. C. Vernon Gray was elected as the first African-American council member in an at-large election in 1982, and today I have no doubt that someone like Calvin Ball would be able to win election to the council on an at-large basis. Maybe I’ve missed something, but in modern times Howard County just doesn’t appear to have had the type of racially-motivated bloc voting, especially white voters voting as a bloc to reject black candidates, that has been characteristic of many other jurisdictions.

As discussed in chapter 23 of Dividing Howard, in 2001 African-Americans were only 23% of the Council District 2 population, yet local activists saw that as no barrier to electing an African-American council member to replace C. Vernon Gray; as Jared Thornton noted at he time, “A lot of things about Columbia seem to be different from any other place. We don’t need a super-majority in Howard County.”¹

However whether (re)introducing at-large council elections would pass legal muster is an entirely different question. Changes made to the Voting Rights Act in 1982 (coincidentally, the year of Howard County’s last at-large council election) tightened up the criteria under which at-large schemes could be deemed discriminatory, and in particular did not require actual intention of discrimination. Thus even if racial motivations were not behind an effort to change council elections to be on an at-large basis, such a change could still face a legal challenge on racial grounds.

However in 2009 in Bartlett v. Strickland the US Supreme Court held that the relevant provision of the Voting Rights Act affecting by-district vs. at-large elections did not apply unless minorities constituted an actual majority in the area in question. Since this is not the case in Council District 2 (or indeed in any council district in Howard County) it may be that a change back to at-large council elections would be relatively immune to legal challenges.²

Beyond its affect on racial and ethnic minorities, another issue with moving to an at-large election system is its effect on the balance between the Democratic and Republican parties in Howard County. It’s a common complaint today that Republicans are under-represented on the county council relative to their share of registered voters: As of the 2010 general election Democrats were about 48% of registered voters, Republicans 31%, and independents 21%, with Democrats thus having a 1.56-1 registration advantage over Republicans, equivalent to 61% and 39% shares respectively of voters registering with the two major parties.³

Looking at election data instead of registration data, in the 2010 general election Democratic council candidates collectively received about 56% of all votes cast for council candidates compared to 44% cast for GOP council candidates, with Democratic council candidates under-performing a bit based on the Democratic registration advantage. If the county council reflected this division then we should expect the GOP to have two seats instead of their current one.⁴

Would electing council members at large correct this situation? I suspect that it would not, unless it were combined with additional changes to the voting system. In the type of at-large elections held in Howard County, both in the past for county council and at present for the Board of Education, the top set of vote-getters (e.g., top five for county council) are elected. (Political scientists refer to this as a multi-member district plurality system.) In such a system parties can run slates of candidates, and if voters select candidates along party lines then it is possible that all candidates selected in an at-large election would be of a single party.

For example, in Howard County if the 55% of voters who voted for Democratic council candidates in the 2010 general election were instead to vote as a bloc for a Democratic slate of five candidates in an at-large election, no Republican council members would be elected at all. As described in chapter 5 of Dividing Howard, this is pretty much what happened in the last at-large council election in 1982, with Democrats winning all five council seats and the only GOP candidate (Charles Feaga) being shut out.

Correcting this situation, so that the party composition of the council better reflects the party composition of the electorate, would require not just the abandonment of council districts but also the introduction of a voing scheme for proportional or semi-proportional representation. To go back to the 1982 Howard County council election, being the only GOP candidate didn’t help Charles Feaga: The best Republican voters could do was to vote for Feaga only, and no other candidate; however since Democrats significantly outnumbered Republicans this was insufficient to counter the effect of Democrats voting a straight ticket for five Democratic candidates.

One way to address this issue is to allow voters to cast multiple votes for one candidate, so that, for example, a GOP voter in 1982 could cast five votes for Charles Feaga instead of one. This so-called cumulative voting system was actually considered for use in Worcester County, Maryland, back in the 1990s to address the discriminatory effects of an at-large system on black voters. Other possible systems would have people vote for parties (not candidates) and then allot council seats on the basis of the total vote received by each party (a party list system) or allow users to express preferences between candidates (e.g., a single-transferable vote or STV system).

My overall point is that an at-large system in and of itself, especially like the one previously used in Howard County, would not necessarily address the complaints that Howard County Republicans have about the current district system. Neither would a system that combined, say, five council members elected by districts with two at-large members. Electing two members at large would help ensure expansion of the set of voters able to select a council majority (in line with my discussion of selectorate theory in a previous post), but given the Democratic advantage in voter preferences it’s quite likely that the two at-large members would always be Democrats, converting the present 4-1 Democratic council majority into a 6-1 majority.

This simple fact is that no voting system is perfect or can be perfect, in the sense of correctly reflecting all voters’ preferences and not producing results that seem to be contradictory to common sense. If people want to reform the way Howard County Council candidates are elected (a goal with which I’m sympathetic) then they’ll need to take the time to properly sift through the alternatives and (most important) build a strong case to the people of Howard County as to why such a change is necessary. Recall from Dividing Howard that it took at least five years to convince voters to move from the previous commissioner system to a county executive and county council, and over ten years to convince voters to replace the at-large system with council districts. For anyone interested in avoiding having another round of council redistricting in 2021, the time to start working is now.

One reason I decided to write my series of blog posts on Howard County council redistricting was to provide a sense of perspective about the issue that I think is badly needed. One reason I turned the blog series into the Dividing Howard ebook was to make it available for future readers who might be interested in the topic when the next round of redistricting occurs. If you haven’t already bought a copy, while wait until 2021? Dividing Howard is only $2.99 from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and all royalties go to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in Howard County courts.

Drawing district lines, whether of council districts or congressional districts, is one of those mundane political processes that tend to get people excited only when something particularly egregious happens—for example, the 2003 redistricting controversy in Texas, when (among other things) Democratic members of the Texas legislature actually fled the state in order to deny Republicans a quorum to pass a redistricting plan for Texas’s congressional districts. The usual solution proposed at such times is to “take the politics out of redistricting,” for example by having it be done by an independent and ostensibly nonpartisan commission.

Iowa was a leader in this regard, having established by law in 1980 a special agency (the Legislative Services Bureau, now part of the Legislative Services Agency) to handle redistricting of Iowa congressional and state legislative districts. The process has run fairly smoothly since then, with the state legislature approving the plans as a matter of course (sometimes after one or two revisions); the LSA completed the 2011 redistricting process in less than three months, with the final plan enacted almost unanimously.¹

More recently in two separate referendums (in 2008 and 2010) the voters of California voted to have an independent Citizens Redistricting Commission draw up district lines for California legislative and US congressional districts. The commission members are chosen randomly from a pool of people determined to have the necessary qualifications, with five slots reserved for Democrats, five for Republicans, and four for independents or members of other parties. Unlike Iowa, the commission itself makes the final decision on district lines, not the state legislature.

As described in chapter 19 of Dividing Howard, Howard County uses a separate redistricting commission to draw council district lines. The members of the commission are nominated by the two main parties’ Central Committees; no independents or members of other parties need apply. (A third party could gain representation, but it would have to attract at least 25% of the vote in the county executive race.) The county council then appoints the commission’s chair to provide a “tie-breaker” vote, so that in practice the work of the commission is controlled by whatever party has a majority on the county council; the council also has the opportunity to modify the redistricting plan proposed by the commission. (This happened in the last round of redistricting, and may happen in this one as well.)

Thus the Howard County redistricting commission doesn’t have the independence and nonpartisan nature that advocates of redistricting reform typically call for. The commission seems to have instead been created mainly as a way to avoid having the county council be involved in the detailed work of creating redistricting plans, while still ensuring that the party with a majority on the council retained control over the outcome.

Making the Howard County redistricting commission more independent (e.g., along the lines of the California commission) would require a change to the Howard County charter, and there doesn’t seem to be any real support at present for making such a change. In the meantime another possible approach is enabling more public participation in the redistricting process, either as part of the formal redistricting process or as part of a separate unofficial initiative.

As described in chapter 7 of Dividing Howard, when the district system was first adopted in Howard County the League of Women Voters encouraged members of the general public to try their own hand at coming up with a district plan, publishing a pamphlet containing the rules for redistricting and the precinct population data needed as input to the process. That effort apparently didn’t have any real impact; beyond the limited public interest in the fine details of redistricting, the process of creating districts is complicated enough that it would be unlikely that a typical citizen would be able to come up with a usable plan that satisfied the various legal criteria (compactness, contiguity, etc.) without some sort of assistance.

However recent years have seen growing interest in and work toward creating redistricting applications that can be used by non-experts; these are typically based on geographic information system (GIS) applications with additional software to implement redistricting algorithms of various levels of sophistication. For example, ESRI, the vendor of the most popular family of GIS applications, partnered with Los Angeles County to create the Public Access Plan site to allow residents to create and submit their own plans.

Other organizations and even individuals have produced open source software that allows anyone to run a redistricting application for their own use or for use by the general public. The most notable of such projects is the Public Mapping Project, which has created the open source District Builder software. I actually played around with District Builder a fair bit to see if I could get it working, but ran into enough issues that I had to give it up. For those with more money than time the GIS vendor Azavea (whose developers helped create District Builder) offers implementation services; Azavea also sponsors the informative Redistricting the Nation site.²

However ultimately the attempts to create “citizen maps” will come to naught unless they receive institutional backing from those who actually have some measure of official input into the process. In a local context, Howard County Republicans seem to have approached this round of redistricting pretty much as they did the last time, like a football team that always runs it up the middle. It would have been interesting to see the Howard County GOP change their game plan somewhat and go with an approach that explicitly incorporated public input and participation.

For example, why not put local Republican redistricting experts to work creating a Howard County equivalent of the Los Angeles public access site, have the League of Women Voters or some other nonpartisan group sponsor it, and commit in advance to present as the Republican plan whatever came out of that public process? In the absence of a council majority the end result would have likely been the same, but the Howard County GOP I think would have been in a better position to lobby against district changes it didn’t like and to gain public support for future changes to improve its position in the redistricting game.

Or maybe the better thing, not just for Howard County Republicans but for Howard County as a whole, would just be to abandon the council district system entirely, and go back to electing council members at large. I’ll have more to say on that in my next post.

In the meantime I encourage you to check out Dividing Howard if you haven’t already; it’s only $2.99 from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and all royalties go to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in Howard County courts.

Ken Stevens (ksteve8@verizon.net) - 2011-12-15 13:22

Congratulations on turning your historical study of councilmanic redistricting in Howard County into a book. As a student of politics, I’ve had a longtime interest in redistricting at all levels (from the congressional to the state legislature to the county Council). I suppose I’m more cynical than most about the prospects of getting politics out of it. When one major party can maximize its advantage in the states where it has the power to do so, the other major party must do the same wherever it can or it is effectively committing political suicide. It took a referendum to set up the supposedly non-partisan California process, Even that (or the one in Iowa) is, I submit, not fully removed from the realm of political interest. You’d have to bring in commission members from the moon for that. Just volunteering to serve on a non-partisan redistricting commission indicates a degree of political interest. Although not perfect, maximum political fairness, I believe, would require adoption of an amendment to the US Constitution requiring a non-partisan redistricting commission in every state. As regards Howard County councilmanic redistricting, it’s difficult but not impossible for any county resident willing to put enough time and effort into it to come up with a fairly complete plan on their own. I’ve presented such plans to the official commissions after the past three censuses. The only real difficulty I ran into this year was getting census block population numbers in certain precincts that i wanted to split. So I had to be fairly general in that one area. Ray Rankin also presented a plan (more than one in his case) to the commission this year. Ken Stevens

hecker - 2011-12-15 13:54

Ken, thanks for stopping by again. (Incidentally, I hope you know you got mentioned in the acknowledgements of the book.) I too am skeptical about the possibility of doing nonpartisan redistricting; that’s why the title of the post is a question not a statement.

Ken Stevens (ksteve8@verizon.net) - 2011-12-15 16:42

Thanks, Frank. I’ll have to buy a copy of the book.

There are really two questions here: First, has there been gerrymandering going on with respect to council district lines? I think the answer to this is yes, as evidenced by the past behavior and statements of the people engaged in drawing district lines; see the later chapters of Dividing Howard for many examples. (Although arguably the gerrymandering in question has been less egregious than in other jurisdictions.) That’s not to say that it’s simply a matter of evil Democrats and victimized Republicans; there’s no question that Howard County Republicans would return the favor if they were ever in a position to do so. (And in fact Republicans in other jurisdictions have happily engaged in blatant gerrymandering against Democrats when given the chance.)

Second, why exactly is gerrymandering bad? There are many answers that people have given to this question: It reduces competition and prevents having a healthy two-party system, it advantages incumbents and discourages “new blood” in politics, it violates principles of fairness, and so on.

However I think a better answer is that gerrymandering works against the nominal purpose of government, to provide for the greater good of all. A good explanation for why this is the case comes from “selectorate theory“, an idea in political science recently discussed in the popular work The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. Selectorate theory provides a simple general model of how those who exercise power are motivated to behave, no matter the type of political system in which they operate.¹

In our context the important characteristics of the model are as follows:

1. The primary goal of all leaders is to remain in power. (They could certainly also be motivated by more noble motives, like serving the public, but if they do not remain in power then they will be unable to act on those motives.)
2. Given point 1, leaders will act first in the interests of those whose support is needed to stay in power, and only secondarily in their own interest. The interests of everyone else will always come last.
3. When the number of needed supporters is very small relative to the size of population (or, in general, the size of the group over which the leader exercises power) then leaders will attract supporters primarily by providing them private goods not made available to others. As the number of needed supporters increases to a significant fraction of the total population then providing private goods to supporters becomes less and less feasible and leaders will provide support increasingly in the form of public goods that benefit supporters but are generally available to others as well.

In this model the difference between a dictatorship and a representative democracy is not that leaders of democracies are more moral and public-spirited, rather it’s that unlike dictators they must rely on coalitions of supporters that are much larger: A typical dictator might require the support of only a few dozen or few hundred people (key members of the military, intelligence service, personal guard, and various cronies), while the typical leader of a populous representative democracy might need the support of at least a few million people to gain and hold power.

In this light the problem with gerrymandering is this: It lowers the size of the “winning coalition” needed to put a leader into power, and therefore increases the chance that the leader will focus on the needs of the supporters in that coalition to the detriment of the needs of everyone else. This is most clearly seen in cities like Baltimore that are heavily dominated by Democrats or states like Utah that are heavily dominated by Republicans: In such jurisdictions the general election is essentially irrelevant, the outcome having already been decided in the party primaries, in which the number of people voting is relatively small. As long as politicians in these jurisdictions can keep their primary voter base happy it doesn’t matter whether anybody else is satisfied.

Closer to home, let’s look at the 2010 general election results for the Howard County Council. In Council Districts 2, 3, and 4 the Democratic candidates won the general election with approximately 67% of the vote, and in Council District 5 the Republican candidate won the general election with 67% of the vote. Only District 1 was relatively competitive, the Democratic candidate winning with 53% of the vote.²

In 2010 there were almost 180,000 registered voters in Howard County. However most of these were irrelevant to the final results. In particular, since Democratic dominance of Districts 2, 3, and 4 was so complete those races were arguably decided at the time of the party primaries. For example, in District 4 there were approximately 37,000 registered voters (the so-called “nominal selectorate”), but the race was essentially decided by the roughly 6,200 voters in the Democratic primary (the “real selectorate”), so that Mary Kay Sigaty’s winning coalition could be as small as about 3,100 voters—less than 10% of the total voter population in the district.

Similar calculations could be done for the other districts. As it happens both Calvin Ball in District 2 and Jen Terrasa in District 3 had no primary opposition, but if they had it’s likely that their winning coalitions could have been roughly the same size as Mary Kay Sigaty’s. The net effect is that three out of the five council members, and thus a council majority, could likely be selected based on the votes of as few as 9,000-10,000 people, or about 5% of the total number of registered voters in Howard County.

This is not to say that Calvin Ball, Jen Terrasa, or Mary Kay Sigaty don’t care about the other 95% of Howard County voters; I think they, like Courtney Watson and Greg Fox, in general are sincerely working for the good of Howard County as a whole. However if there’s something to selectorate theory, and I think there is, then I think it makes sense to arrange things so that politicians need as large a winning coalition as possible in order to get elected. This minimizes any incentives to favor a limited set of supporters at the expense of others, and maximizes the chances that their actions will be to the good of all.

Minimizing gerrymandering also can help prevent situations where a relatively small minority of voters can thwart the will of the majority and in essence demand special favors for themselves. For example, consider the current structure of the US Senate: Because of the Senate’s rules on filibusters a minority of 40 senators can prevent legislation from passing unless it is modified to meet their demands (which, per selectorate theory, are really the demands of their winning coalitions). That minority of senators could then be elected from as few as twenty states, and those could be states with relatively small populations. If those states are also dominated by one party then in effect the direction of the country as a whole could hinge on the votes of at most a few million people.³

In a local context the Taxpayer Protection Initiative promoted by Howard County Republicans could have produced a similar effect had it been passed, allowing two council members out of five to block tax measures. Those members in turn could be elected with as few as 13,000-14,000 voters—about 2,500 voters in the Republican primary in District 5 and about 11,000 voters to elect a Republican in the general election in District 1—and would have the opportunity to hold spending measures hostage in order to extract special favors for their own supporters.⁴

So what would I suggest we do with respect to the current system of drawing council district lines? That will be the topic of my next two posts.

In the meantime I encourage you to check out Dividing Howard if you haven’t already; it’s only $2.99 from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and all royalties go to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in Howard County courts.

Democrats have held a voter registration advantage over Republicans for the past fifty years in Howard County, and that advantage has reliably translated into an electoral advantage. Since Howard County’s current charter form of government came into effect in the late 1960s and the Howard County Council was established, Democrats have had a majority on the council for all but four years of that time.¹

That in turn has translated into Democrats having ultimate control over drawing the district lines for county council elections. The later chapters of Dividing Howard are filled with complaints from local Republicans about Democratic gerrymandering of council districts and exhortations to draw council district lines in a way that is allegedly more fair.

As it happens I too am concerned about the possibility of gerrymandering, both with county council districts and more generally. (I’ll have more to say about this soon.) However at the same time I don’t see local Republicans simply as innocent victims of a dastardly Democratic plot. To a large degree Howard County Republicans are complicit in the creation of the current council system under which they’re struggling to achieve electoral success.

First, as I discussed in yesterday’s post, if the planned community of Columbia had not been established then Howard County would likely have remained under the county commissioner form of government; it was local Republican leaders who originally formed the “How-Char-Go Committee” to promote switching Howard County to a charter form of government, and local Democratic leaders who pushed back, telling voters to reject a charter referendum in the 1964 general election (which the voters proceeded to do). Local Democrats eventually joined the charter movement, but there’s no question it started out as a Republican project.

In retrospect Howard County Republicans clearly didn’t realize that the establishment of Columbia would lead to a major influx of liberal Democrat voters, and any “buyer’s remorse” they might have felt is completely understandable. (See for example local Republican leader Charles Miller’s comments in 1977 on the tenth anniversary of Columbia, in which he expresses regret at having listened to Jim Rouse’s sale pitch.) However rather than accepting the new situation and trying to do their best to deal with it electorally, Republicans then proceeded to make it arguably worse from their point of view.

More specifically, when the Howard County Council was originally established in 1969 there were no council districts. All Howard County Council members were elected at large. However as discussed in chapter 2 of Dividing Howard, in the 1974 general election the growing population of Columbia led to the election of four Columbia Democrats to the county council, as well as the election of a county executive (Edward Cochran, father of Courtney Watson) who was sympathetic to the concerns of Columbia voters.

As outlined in chapters 3 through 6 of Dividing Howard, the result was a growing backlash in the rest of the county against Columbia’s political power, a backlash that led to a push by local Republicans and conservative Democrats to elect council members by district, in order to minimize as much as possible the influence of Columbia voters. In fact, the original district proposal would have expanded the council from five members to seven, and would have required that the five council incumbents, including the four council members from Columbia, compete in only two council districts of the seven proposed—this at a time when Columbia voters were approaching half of the Howard County electorate. No wonder 80% of Columbia voters rejected this plan in 1976.

Undeterred, local Republicans continued to join conservative Democrats in pushing for a council district scheme: Local Republican leader Charles Feaga led a petition drive to revive the seven-district scheme in 1980 after a Democrat-dominated commission had rejected the scheme. After his unsuccessful council bid in 1982 (in which he came in sixth as Democrats won all five at-large council positions) Feaga continued to push for establishment of council districts, along with other Republicans. Once council districts were approved by Howard County voters in 1984 Feaga was able to take advantage of the district system to finally become the first (and at that time, only) Republican council member in 1986.

So although Republicans were not the sole force behind the creation of council districts (I think the role of conservative Democrats outside of Columbia was more important), they certainly were consistently vocal in support of the district system and happy to see it established. Once districts were actually in place Republicans found themselves on the losing end of the council redistricting game, beginning with the 1986 redistricting effort, since the council was empowered to draw district lines and the council still had a Democratic majority. That’s when the Republican complaints of Democratic gerrymandering began.

Subsequently Howard County Republicans arguably botched their best chance of countering such gerrymandering. After the 1990 election of Republican Charles Ecker as county executive, Republicans were able to throw some sand in the gears of the redistricting process, using Ecker’s veto and a subsequent lawsuit, but still lacked the council majority necessary to control the process. However in 1994 Ecker won re-election and Republicans won a three-seat majority on the county council, as Feaga was joined by Darrell Drown and Dennis Schrader. If the Republicans had been able to repeat that success in 1998 then they would have been in a position to control council redistricting after the 2000 census.

However in 1998 Ecker had to step down due to term limits and Darrel Drown declined to run again for personal reasons. Charles Feaga and Dennis Schrader chose to give up their council seats and run against each other for the county executive position. This meant that there were open seats in all three council districts previously held by Republicans. Allan Kittleman succeeded Feaga in the safe Republican seat in western Howard, and Chris Merdon was able to hold Drown’s Ellicott City seat for the GOP. However in the absence of Dennis Schrader Republicans lost the District 3 seat in southeastern Howard to Democrat Guy Guzzone, and Schrader himself lost to James Robey in the county executive race.

The result was that a Democratic-majority county council had control of the council redistricting process after the 2000 census, and (unlike 1990) they had a Democratic county executive to back them up. That same situation holds true after the 2010 general election, except that Republicans have further lost ground on the county council, now retaining only the western Howard seat originally won by Charles Feaga back in 1986.

However as I said above, even if Howard County Republicans have committed a number of own goals in getting to their current state, I still think they have have a good general point about the undesirability of the current district system in terms of providing opportunities for gerrymandering. I’ll have more to say about that topic beginning with my next post.

In the meantime I encourage you to check out Dividing Howard if you haven’t already; it’s only $2.99 from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and all royalties go to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in Howard County courts.

In his recent post “Meanwhile, in an alternate universe…” Bill Woodcock of 53 Beers on Tap speculated on what would have happened in Howard County if the planned community of Columbia had never been built. His conclusion:

Howard County would have developed further along its major highways—I-70, US 40, US 29, US 1. . . .

Without a major population center, rather several smaller ones, Howard County would’ve become an exurb of Baltimore and DC rather than a suburb. Pressure would be great to build more homes in Howard, absent a major employer or tax base. …

In short, life in Howard County would have become radically different. Howard County would have become a balkanized bedroom community with no identity or clear sense of purpose. It would become southern Carroll County, on steroids.

I think this is pretty much on the mark. However at one point Bill mentions in passing what “the new charter government” would have done in the absence of Columbia. This is where I differ from him: As I discuss in chapter 1 of Dividing Howard, the fact that Howard County has a charter form of government, that is, a county council and county executive, is pretty much a direct result of the establishment of Columbia.

As Lewis Nippard, a member of the committee pushing for a charter change, said back in September 1963, “We do not believe the [existing] county commissioner form of government can meet the needs of the future as the county population begins to increase toward astronomical levels.” Nippard and others also pointed to the fact that Howard County had no incorporated towns or cities (in fact, it still doesn’t), and thus no real local government beyond the three county commissioners, who had to look to the Maryland General Assembly to enact any legislation needed to address Howard County local issues.¹

As it turned out, Nippard was right about the “astronomical level” of population growth; as Columbia was created and new residents flooded in beginning in the late 1960s, Howard County population growth grew to over 10% a year, a rate that would have doubled the county population every seven years if it had been sustained. (See my blog post “Howard County population growth, 1950–2009“ for more on this.) Absent the prospect of that growth I suspect that Howard County would have remained under the existing county commissioner system, and at most there would have been a push to formally incorporate Ellicott City (as Bill speculates).

The experience of neighboring counties is a guide here: Both Frederick County and Carroll County are situated similarly to Howard County in terms of their proximity to major major metropolitan areas, and both have experienced exurban development over the years. However neither of them had comparable developments to that of Columbia, and both also had existing incorporated towns and cities. Although both counties have considered or are considering moving to a charter form of government, both still remain governed by a Board of Commissioners. If Columbia had never existed I strongly suspect this would be true of Howard County as well.

One other key thing to note about Carroll and Frederick counties is that every county commissioner in both counties is a Republican. I’ll have more to say on that topic in my next post.

In the meantime I encourage you to check out Dividing Howard if you haven’t already; it’s only $2.99 from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and all royalties go to the local charity Voices for Children, which recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in Howard County courts.

I’m selling the book for $2.99, and will donate all royalties I receive (about $2 per copy) to Voices for Children, the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program in Howard County. Voices for Children recruits and trains volunteer advocates to represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in the Howard County Courts. I’ll post updates from time to time on how many copies of the book I’ve sold and how much I’ve been able to donate.

To answer some questions you may have:

You don’t actually need a Kindle or Nook device to read the book; you can use the Kindle or Nook applications for iPhone, iPad, and Android phones and tablets, available at no charge from the application stores for those devices. Don’t have a smartphone or tablet? You can use the Kindle or Nook applications for PC or Mac instead; just google “Kindle PC,” “Nook Mac,” and so on to find the application of your choice.

At this time I don’t have versions of the book available for download directly to the iBooks ereader application for iPhone or iPad or to ereader devices from Kobo, Sony, and others. That’s because those ereaders and their associated online stores don’t support an easy-t0-use no-charge self-publishing system like those provided by Amazon.com (Kindle Direct Publishing) and Barnes and Noble (PubIt!). However if your ereader device or application supports the EPUB ebook format and “sideloading” content then you can buy the Barnes and Noble version for the Nook application for PC or Mac, make a copy of the resulting EPUB-format file (which is DRM-free), and load it for use in your favorite ereader. (Ask your tech-y friends if you need more information on how to do this.)

At this time I have no plans to publish a print version of the book. Beyond the extra work involved, I’ve tried to take advantage of the ebook format and have included a lot of web links to primary sources. You can’t grep a dead tree, as the saying goes, and you can’t click on a link on one either. However if there’s a lot of people wanting this and I have copious spare time in the next month or two then I might reconsider.

Finally, the book ends where the blog series does, with the passage of the redistricting bill after the 2001 census (almost exactly ten years ago, as it happens). After the current round of redistricting ends I may produce a second edition that brings the story up to the present day, again depending on your interest and my time.

In the meantime buy the book, tell your friends, write a review or send me your suggestions on how to improve it. Thanks to all of you for reading the series over the past year and for providing the inspiration to collect it into book form.

P.S. A final note: There’s a minor glitch with the Kindle version of the book that causes the book to open to the last page the first time you read it after downloading. (Once you start reading it in the right place then the Kindle will remember where you were after that.) There may also be a few remaining typos I haven’t caught. At some point I may issue an updated version of the book and replace the current version on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. If and when I do that I’ll post instructions on how you can update your copy if you’d like to do that.

Angela Beltram - 2011-12-17 14:13

When the people voted to have districts, it was opposed by many people who realized that since the County Council sits as the Zoning Board, there was no way that four out of five could be held “accountable” for the actions of the majority. “Accountability” is the word people use who continue to support the Council as the Zoning board. There have been proposals to have a “Hearing Officer” who would be an “expert” in land use Maryland law and who would be much stricter that an elected Board who sometimes make “political” decisions on land use. There also has been some support for expanding the Council to 7 members with two running at large. That way, those two would have a “global” view of issues in the County and at the same time provide the citizens with a potential choice of voting for three ( a district represenative and two additional at large). I believe this will occur next time. For all the ballyhooing from the black community and the Republicans, they got what they wanted – districts. As stated by you and by me, personally at the hearings on the proposed idea of “districts” for School Board, I stated that C. Vernon Gray was elected over 25 years ago without “districts” and continued again to do so. So…I may not be around for the “next time” but you may remember these arguments.

hecker - 2011-12-17 22:23

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I very much appreciate hearing from people with first-hand knowledge of what went on.

August 2001. Speculation arises over future council candidates, and in particular over who will succeed the retiring Mary Lorsung in District 4. At the center of attention is 27-year-old Columbia native Ken Ulman, championed by District 3 incumbent Guy Guzzone and other local and state Democratic politicians. Republican hopeful Greg Fox, who ran unsuccessfully against Lorsung in 1998, puts his own plans on hold pending resolution of council redistricting, which might put his Fulton home in any one of Districts 3, 4, or 5.

Meanwhile the redistricting commission winnows the number of plans down from five to three, moving forward with the Democratic plans proposed by David Marker and Priscilla Hart and the Republican plan proposed by Michael Deets. Deets modifies his plan to keep Kings Contrivance and thus Guy Guzzone in District 3 (“I’m hoping that will be more to his liking”) but regrets abandoning his proposal to keep all of Columbia within District 2 and 4 (“I never bought into the idea that a community that represents 40 percent of the county’s population should get 60 percent of the County Council”). Marker focuses on not diluting the voting strength of minorities in Districts 2, 3, and 4 (“Any plan that doesn’t keep them strong in three districts could be attacked for weakening minority representation”) while Warren Miller stresses the need for better equalizing the number of Democrats and Republicans in those districts, claiming that Republicans are “close to having parity” in the county.

In any case expectations are that a Democratic plan will prevail given the composition of the redistricting commission and the county council (“They have the votes,” notes District 5 incumbent Allan Kittleman), and David Marker sees a path to a compromise between his plan and that of fellow Democrat Priscilla Hart. Guy Guzzone professes no hard feelings over the attempt of Michael Deets to redistrict him out of District 3 (“Would I get mad at someone for doing what’s best for their party? No. I understand where they’re coming from”) while Allan Kittleman accepts the inevitable outcome (“I will be happy to represent anyone they put in my district. Whatever they want to give me, I’ll take”).

(Michael Cody, “Political jockeying under way,” Columbia Flier, August 9, 2001; Laura Cadiz, “Redistricting plans picked for hearing,” Baltimore Sun, August 15, 2001, 1B; Laura Cadiz, “Redistricting apt to favor status quo,” Baltimore Sun, August 19, 2001, 1B.)

September 2001. As the redistricting commission prepares for public hearings on the (now) three plans, speculation about future county council candidates shifts to District 2, where a previously-passed term limits measure means Democratic incumbent C. Vernon Gray will have to step down after a run of five terms and 20 years on the council. Local activists lament the absence of any African-American candidates to replace Gray (“We’re still struggling for representation here. I think there needs to be a wake-up call,” says the Rev. John Wright) while the Howard County NAACP stays out of the fray (“We’re not a political group,” notes chapter president Thelma Lucas) and Gray himself declines to recruit a successor (“[It’s] unreasonable for someone in political office to drag someone into the political process”). In the absence of a clear front-runner several potential candidates ponder their options, including Cameron Miles of Ellicott City and 26-year-old Calvin Ball III of Columbia. Meanwhile in District 4 community activist Mary Kay Sigaty joins Ken Ulman as a potential county council candidate now that Mary Lorsung is retiring (“There’s no way I would run against [Lorsung]. She’s very good at what she does,” notes Sigaty).

A public hearing on the three proposed plans is as sparsely attended as previous redistricting commission hearings, with 14 attendees of which nine make public statements. However the speakers make up in intensity what they lack in numbers, as former council candidate John Taylor complains about being moved from District 4 to District 5, Sherman Howell worries about changes to District 2 making it harder to elect an African-American candidate to replace C. Vernon Gray, Republicans Louis Pope and Kirk Halpin protest the relatively wide population variations between the districts in the Democratic plans, and Libertarian council candidate David Margolis criticizes the entire redistricting process (“All of you have played political games. Your arrogance has been on display from Day 1”).

The redistricting commission prepares to select one of the three remaining plans to recommend to the council. Facing certain defeat for their own plan, Republicans call for a vote to approve the plan proposed by Democratic commission member Priscilla Hart. Commission chair David Marker issues a whispered warning to Hart (“Priscilla, you can’t vote for this!”) and Hart abstains from the vote “out of party loyalty” (“I was caught in the middle”). The vote fails 3–3 with Hart abstaining, and the commission proceeds to approve the other Democratic plan (with a few amendments) by a 4–3 margin. Marker expresses regret at the party-line vote (“I thought we compromised a lot. I was disappointed”) while Republican commission member Michael Deets begs to differ (“Democrats weren’t even willing to accede to our standards of fairness”). The plan extends District 5 to encompass parts of Fulton and Scaggsville, moves Dorsey Search from District 1 into District 4 with the rest of west Columbia, and puts almost all of Owen Brown into District 3.

(Larry Carson, “No one vying to fill Gray’s council seat,” Baltimore Sun, September 9, 2001, 1B; Larry Carson, “Differences help define hopefuls for council post,” Baltimore Sun, September 17, 2001, 1B; Larry Carson, “Public hearing on tap for voting districts,” Baltimore Sun, September 9, 2001, 1B; Larry Carson, “Council district plans critiqued,” Baltimore Sun, September 16, 2001, 1B; Larry Carson, “Democrats prevail in redistricting vote,” Baltimore Sun, September 21, 2001, 1B; Michael Cody, “Democrats set to gain strength in redistricting,” Howard County Times, September 27, 2001.)

October 2001. Candidates formally announce in the District 2 race to succeed C. Vernon Gray, as Calvin Ball joins community activist Michelle Williams to pursue the Democratic nomination. Ball notes that being a council member “sounds just like my job now. People call me whenever they have a problem.” Redistricting commission member Jared Thornton notes the high likelihood of electing an African-American candidate in a district with a 23% black population: “A lot of things about Columbia seem to be different from any other place. We don’t need a super-majority in Howard County.” Ball and Williams join announced candidates Mary Kay Sigaty and Ken Ulman, who are seeking the Democratic nomination for the other open council seat in District 4.

(Larry Carson, “State employee, 26, files for council seat,” Baltimore Sun, October 4, 2001, 1B; Michael Cody, “Schools activist plans run for County Council,” Columbia Flier, September 13, 2001.)

November 2001. The council holds a public hearing on the plan recommended by the redistricting commission, and prepares for a vote. However various council members propose last-minute changes to the plan: Mary Lorsung wants to keep parts of Fulton in District 4 instead of moving them to District 5, and keep some areas north of Route 108 in District 5 instead of moving them into District 4; the changes affect 70 voters in total. On the Republican side, District 5 incumbent Allan Kittleman wants to move 2,707 voters from Scaggsville and elsewhere in southern Howard County from his district into District 3, while District 1 incumbent Christopher Merdon tries to keep part of Ellicott City in his district and move part of Elkridge back into District 2. Democratic council members C. Vernon Gray and Guy Guzzone warn that they won’t stand for further changes to their districts.

(Larry Carson, “Panel vote favors raises,” Baltimore Sun, November 6, 2001, 1B; Larry Carson, “Council district changes proposed,” Baltimore Sun, November 28, 2001, 1B.)

December 2001. The council finally votes on a redistricting plan. Democrat Mary Lorsung joins Republicans Allan Kittleman and Christopher Merdon in approving various amendments to the plan, with her fellow Democrats C. Vernon Gray and Guy Guzzone opposing the changes. Angered by the passage of the amendments, Gray waits for the other members to deadlock 2–2 and then casts a deciding vote against the final bill as amended, thinking to take advantage of the charter provision that would force adoption of the original redistricting commission plan in the absence of council agreement.

Allan Kittleman smiles broadly (“I bet my mouth was touching both ears”), realizing that the defeat of the bill would allow Republicans the opportunity to pursue further changes and try to get three votes in favor of an alternative plan before the March 15 deadline (“I thought, ‘My gosh, he’s given me an opportunity to write the plan.’ It certainly was something I was relishing”). After a series of consultations between Gray and Guy Guzzone and Guzzone and county solicitor Barbera Cook, Gray changes his vote and the council approves the plan as amended. “It’s important to put this to bed and move on,” Gray notes.

The amendments do not affect Districts 2 and 3, but instead make several minor changes to move small numbers of voters between Merdon’s, Kittleman’s, and Lorsung’s districts: keeping in District 5 a section of Ellicott City in which Kittleman’s legislative aide resides, keeping all of the Font Hill community in District 1, and moving some voters along Homewood Road back into District 5 in exchange for keeping some voters in Fulton and Highland in District 4. The final districts range in size from under 48,000 to over 50,000.¹

(Larry Carson, “Lines drawn for council,” Baltimore Sun, December 4, 2001, 1B; Michael Cody, “Redistricting re-vote erases GOP’s momentary edge,” Columbia Flier, December 6, 2001.)

Thus ends the post-2000-census council redistricting process, as the Democrats retaking control of the council in 1998 pays off with a Democratic-friendly district map that will be in effect for the next three council elections.

Almost ten years later and exactly one year to the day after I posted part 1, this is an appropriate point to end this series on the history of county council redistricting in Howard County. But I’m not quite done yet; please stayed tuned for an upcoming special announcement of possible interest to those of you who’ve been reading these posts thus far.

December 2000. Facing a tight deadline for county council redistricting (with the 2002 council elections less than two years away), the Democratic and Republican parties prepare to name members to the seven-person redistricting commission. The Democrats publicly advertise for any party activists willing to serve, an action that surprises county GOP chair Louis Pope: “You want people who understand the numbers, the issues and who can work toward a compromise.” Both parties praise the new system as a better way to do redistricting than that followed in the previous cycle, in which conflict between the Democratic council majority and Republican county executive Charles Ecker degenerated into a lawsuit. Notes Maryland state delegate Robert Flanagan, “At the very least members of the commission won’t be worried about their own [political] hides.”

(Larry Carson, “Parties will present names for redistricting commission,” Baltimore Sun, December 14, 2000, 3B.)

February-March 2001. The two parties feud over appointments to the redistricting commission, as Republicans object to the Democrat’s choice of David Marker as commission chair, citing his actions during the early 1990s redistricting controversy and his public comments about working to produce a favorable result for Democrats. GOP council members Allan Kittleman and Christopher Merdon (representing Districts 1 and 5 respectively) propose instead appointing Carole Conors, president of the county chapter of the League of Women Voters, and take advantage of District 4 Democratic council member Mary Lorsung’s absence in Europe to force a postponement of the creation of the commission.

District 2 Democratic council member C. Vernon Gray fumes, “This is nothing more than blatant partisan game-playing,” while Marker acknowledges it as a “good ploy by the Republicans to maximize their advantage.” Meanwhile Conors protests that she wants to be on the commission to represent the League (“We belong at the table”) but not as chair, and the Columbia Flier worries about a return to the partisan bickering of the previous redistricting effort (“If the council blows this job, the people—not the politicians—will pay the price.”).

Back from Europe, Mary Lorsung is outraged that, unlike Republicans (who nominated B. Diane Wilson, aide to former Distrct 3 council member Dennis Schrader), Democrats did not nominate any women to the redistricting commission: “Frankly, I thought we had gotten way beyond that. . . . One [woman] out of seven was just not acceptable.” Trying to put an end to the controversy, Democrats add Lorsung ally Priscilla Hart to the commission, while still nominating David Marker as chair. District 3 Democratic council member Guy Guzzone notes that Republicans “didn’t get rid of David Marker . . . [but they] certainly created a bit of anger within the Democratic Party,” while Allan Kittleman and Christopher Merdon voice their approval of adding a Democratic woman to join GOP nominee Wilson (Kittleman: “We agree with Mary [Lorsung] on that. Ms. Hart wouldn’t be there without Chris and I.”). In addition to Marker, Hart, and Wilson, other nominees to the redistricting commission are Neil Quinter and J. T. Thornton for the Democrats and Michael Deets and Warren Miller for the Republicans.

(Michael Cody, “Councilmanic redistricting again under the microscope,” Columbia Flier, February 22, 2001; Larry Carson, “Feud delays redistricting commission,” Baltimore Sun, March 6, 2001, 1B; “Council deadlocks on naming districting panel,” Columbia Flier, March 7, 2001; “Don’t let partisan strife again poison county redistricting,” Columbia Flier, March 7, 2001; Larry Carson, “Democrats add woman to redistricting panel,” Baltimore Sun, March 28, 2001, 6B.)

April 2001. As the county council waits for another try at appointing the redistricting commission, local politicians speculate on the effects of Howard County’s population growth (an increase of 32% since the 1990 census, to 247,800 people) on its political clout in Annapolis (“I would certainly hope that we will gain a whole legislative district for Howard County,” says local Democratic chair Wendy Fiedler) and on the political balance between Columbia and the rest of Howard County (“the growth that’s occurred [outside of Columbia] has got to help Republicans more than Democrats,” says local GOP chair Louis Pope).

Relatively even population growth throughout the county means that only two council districts are outside the desired size of approximately 50,000 residents, with District 1 needing to become somewhat smaller and District 3 somewhat larger. However changes to District 1 and District 3 would force changes to other districts as well. Christopher Merdon anticipates a “big counter-clockwise turn,” in which District 3 would expand toward Columbia, District 2 would take part of Elkridge (splitting it with District 1), and District 1 might expand westward a bit into District 5.

District 3 incumbent Guy Guzzone looks forward to the possibility of having all of Owen Brown in his district, a move which would increase the chances of his retaining the seat. (Merdon concedes, “They’ll probably try to make Guy’s [district] a little more Democrat to solidify that for the majority.”) Local GOP chair Louis Pope also anticipates Democrats wanting to expand District 4 to remove from District 2 people angered by Guzzone’s position on rezoning of the Maple Lawn Farm property in Fulton. Meanwhile the council looks forward to approving the final composition of the redistricting commission.¹

(Larry Carson, “Census gains may bring more political power,” Baltimore Sun, March 21, 2001, 1B; Larry Carson, “Border shifts for districts may be small,” Baltimore Sun, April 15, 2001, 1B; Michael Cody, “Council districts likely to shift for next election,” Columbia Flier, April 5, 2001; Larry Carson, “Higher fire tax looking likely,” Baltimore Sun, April 17, 2001, 1B.)

June 2001. The newly-appointed redistricting commission holds its first public hearing at Long Reach High School and almost outnumbers the audience, as only a handful of residents show up and only three of them speak. Why? “Because there’s nothing to react against [yet],” explains commission member Michael Deets, while fellow commission member Priscilla Hart concurs: “We know it’s easier to react to a plan than to put one together.” Of those speaking, Ken Stevens endorses re-unifying all of Owen Brown in a single district, Rosemary Mortimer recommends not splitting school districts across council district boundaries, and David Margolis expresses a hope the the process “doesn’t get mired down in politics.”

(Larry Carson, “Residents speak out on redistricting,” Baltimore Sun, June 27, 2001, 1B; “Redistricting group hears from citizens,” Columbia Flier, June 28, 2001.)

July 2001. As the redistricting commission gets down to the task of drawing up plans, redistricting commission member and Columbia Democratic Club president Neil Quinter presents his and the club’s proposal, which would (as previously discussed) move all of Owen Brown from District 2 (east Columbia/Jessup) into District 3 (north Laurel/Savage/southeast Columbia), move Dorsey’s Search from District 1 (Ellicott City/Elkridge) into District 4 (west Columbia), and extend GOP-dominated District 5 from western Howard eastward to encompass parts of the Fulton/Maple Lawn/Scaggsville area that were previously part of either District 4 or District 3.

“They’re trying to get rid of areas bad for them,” claims District 5 council member Allan Kittleman, a claim with which Maple Lawn Farms opponent Peter Oswald concurs: “[There’s] a substantial amount of dissatisfaction with Guzzone on Maple Lawn Farms. . . . It is to Guzzone’s advantage to move that area to Kittleman’s district.” Quinter defends the proposed plan (“I’m not going to apologize for the fact that we’re trying to strengthen Democratic districts”), while his fellow commission member Jared Thornton notes that at least Howard County is free of the pitched disputes over racially-related redistricting seen in neighboring Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties (“In redistricting, Howard is sort of a boring county”).

The Quinter/Columbia Democratic Club proposal joins four others championed by one or another of the commission’s members, two more Democratic plans (from chair David Marker and Priscilla Hart respectively) and two Republican plans (from Michael Deets and Warren Miller respectively). All three Democratic plans propose expanding District 3 northward to incorporate more of Columbia, while Deets’s plan takes the opposite approach and proposes a Columbia-free District 3; since Guy Guzzone lives in Kings Contrivance this would remove him from his district and put him into District 4 to compete for the seat being vacated by the retiring Mary Lorsung. By contrast Miller’s plan makes relatively minor changes to existing districts in an effort to keep them compact while still making Districts 3 and 4 more competitive for Republicans.

(Larry Carson, “Democrats map plan for keeping majority,” Baltimore Sun, July 26, 2001, 1B; “Democratic club floats new council district map,” Columbia Flier, July 26, 2001; Larry Carson, “5 plans offered for new districts,” Baltimore Sun, July 27, 2001, 1B; Michael Cody, “Rival redistricting plans seek an edge,” Columbia Flier, August 2, 2001.)

In the next post we’ll see the outcome of the redistricting commission’s deliberations, and what the county council did with the commission’s recommendation.

Race Against the Machine. This is a must-read. The basic argument is that exponential advances in software technology threaten to automate all jobs involving low-to-mid-level relatively routine intellectual work, and even threaten what we would consider relatively high-end work (e.g., medical diagnosis). You should read this instead of reading yet another superficial pro- or anti-OWS article. (Plus it’s a smashing bargain as a $3.99 ebook.)

“What if middle-class jobs disappear.” This is an interesting analysis of potential structural changes in the economy, aligned with the arguments in Race Against the Machine. The final paragraphs (e.g., “I believe that a scenario in which many people have dignified jobs and enjoyable lifestyles is more likely to emerge in an environment with decentralized voluntary charities than one with concentrated, coercive government.”) strike me as libertarian wishful thinking in the absence of any real evidence for the likelihood of this outcome.

“Howard County Register of Wills Election Returns, 1851-present.“ Byron Macfarlane, the current Howard County Register of Wills, worked with the Maryland State Archives to put this page together. It would be great if we had a similar online resource for the results of all Howard County local elections from the founding of the county forward (and even greater if we had results down to the precinct level). The usual places (Howard County Board of Elections, Maryland State Board of Elections, Maryland State Archives) seem not to have any information prior to the 1980s or 1990s.

“Adaptive Evolution of Cooperation through Darwinian Dynamics in Public Goods Games.” This paper is pretty technical, and I’d have to read it more closely in order to fully follow the math, but it seems to be an interesting result if the simulations therein reflect reality. The basic idea appears to be as follows, if I’m reading it right: In an evolutionary scenario cooperation can take hold and persist if the returns from cooperation initially increase relatively more rapidly than the number of cooperators. If returns from cooperation do not kick in until the number of cooperators reaches a certain threshold, or if returns increase only proportionately to the number of cooperators, then cooperation cannot arise and persist in the population.

“The Shadow Superpower.” This article discusses the unregulated economy (aka “System D”), its size worldwide, and how it’s increasing in importance in developed countries: “after the financial crisis of 2008-09, System D was revealed to be an important financial coping mechanism. A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank … suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated—in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D—fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations. … By 2020, the OECD projects, two-thirds of the workers of the world will be employed in System D.” In an interesting hitting-close-to-home twist, the article ends with a quote from Joanne Saltzberg of the nonprofit group Women Entrepreneurs of Baltimore.

“The Growth Ponzi Scheme.” TJ Mayotte’s post “A Strong Howard County” alerted me to this interesting article (actually a series of articles). The basic thesis is that suburban growth does not generate sufficient tax revenue to cover long-term maintenance of its associated infrastructure. A couple of key quotes: “If you want a simple explanation for why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted, it is this: Our places do not create wealth, they destroy wealth. Our development pattern—the American style of building our places—is simply not productive enough to sustain itself. . . . We need to wring more value out of our places and that is only going to happen if we understand how to create value in the first place.” [emphasis in the original]

Thanks for inviting me to your reception last Thursday, an invitation that (after a reminder from Jessie Newburn) I was happy to accept, because I think on balance you’ve done a good job as county executive and also because I thought it would be fun to spend some time among the movers and shakers of Howard County. I’m not very forward in social settings so I didn’t stop by to say hello, but now that I’m back in my element I thought I’d bend your ear for a few minutes.

My fellow bloggers Dennis Lane and Tom Coale think you’re serious about running for governor; if so I commend you for doing so given the likely bumps on the road ahead for the world, the nation, and Maryland: Europe crashing and possibly pulling us into a second depression, burdensome public and private debt, and likely Federal and state spending cutbacks in the years ahead—not to mention the continued impact of globalization, climate change, and the possibility that someday computers may take over most professional jobs (no, I’m not kidding).

So, what to do? I’m a Democrat, and think the Republican party has run out of gas intellectually in terms of policy ideas that could improve our country and our state. But that doesn’t mean the Democratic party is that much better, especially if we rely primarily on partisan redistricting and the inertia of Maryland voters to stay in power and then fail to meet the challenges of the coming years.

What are those challenges? Primarily to jump start economic growth and improve productivity in an era of extreme economic dislocation, while at the same time helping people survive those dislocations and find a productive place in the new economy that emerges. You talked a bit along those lines the other evening; allow me to comment briefly on those remarks and provide my own thoughts.

Providing a safety net for those who need it is a traditional Democratic value. You name-checked Healthy Howard and a follow-on effort to create a Maryland health care cooperative (presumably a reference to the Evergreen Project). It sounds like a good idea, and I wish it well. I don’t have much more to say about social services issues in this post, and in general leave blogging about such issues to Duane St. Clair, who does a much better job that I ever could.

On the economic development front you mentioned the Inter-County Broadband Network (which I’ve previously blogged about) as well as your recent trip to Silicon Valley. Here I do have some thoughts: Wiring the state is like setting tables in a restaurant; it doesn’t guarantee anyone’s going to show up to dine. In particular I’m pessimistic about the idea of this region becoming the “Silicon Valley of cybersecurity” given the area’s reliance on Federal defense and intelligence spending, the secretive nature of the work, and the barriers to participation by those not holding security clearances—the polar opposite of the entrepreneurial and open culture of the real Silicon Valley.

How to promote such a culture? One possible approach is to combine a traditional social safety net with a relentless focus on the free market: to promote the economic liberty of everyone to produce and sell useful goods and services while at the same time helping everyone to fulfill their inborn potential to be a productive contributor in the free market (and be rewarded accordingly). As I’ve written previously, there are Maryland-sized places that do this well, and we can look to them for guidance.

In practice this first means looking seriously at the “business-friendly” initiatives proposed by the major business lobbies, but pushing back when such initiatives seem designed simply to reward incumbent players and ensure a docile work force. Then talk to someone like Trevor Greene and ask what he thinks Democrats should do to reduce the regulatory burden on small businesses like his. What about the challenges faced by the growing population of self-employed professionals? Talk to Thursday Bram and David Hobby. Could we do a better job of promoting “street entrepreneurs”? Have Mr. Howchow introduce you to the folks on Route 1 who are enlivening the culinary landscape of Howard County.

Of course, small businesses and “micro-entrepreneurs” don’t drive major job growth; for that we need to attract companies in emerging industries, the potential Apples and Googles of the future. So, for example, look at the emerging personal genomics industry and ask why one of the leading companies in that space (a firm funded in part by Maryland-based VCs) can’t sell its service in Maryland. If we’re going to be touting Johns Hopkins and NIH as foundations for a biotech industry then we also need to look at regulatory factors that influence whether biotech entrepreneurs will want to locate here.

Suppose we can more effectively unleash the forces of free market innovation. Where do we want that innovation to be focused? As TJ Mayotte recently discussed, we need to have places that are economically productive enough that they can generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the costs of both constructing and maintaining government-created infrastructure over the long-term. And the places that are more productive than anywhere else are cities; in fact, cities become relatively more productive the larger they grow.

As Chris Leinberger discussed recently (in the same room where you held your reception) cities provide walkable urban places where people like to live, and make investments in mass transit and related infrastructure much more cost-effective than in suburbs (as Sarah has noted). Howard County would be a more economically productive place if relatively more people lived in Columbia Town Center, a region like western Maryland would be more economically productive if relatively more people lived in Cumberland, and Maryland as a whole would be economically productive if relatively more people lived in Baltimore.

How to accomplish that? Part of the solution lies in addressing perceived disadvantages of cities relating to school quality and public safety, and another in discouraging growth outside cities by reducing government subsidies for inefficient land use. And part may also lie in reducing the barriers to growing cities and overcoming heartfelt but I think ultimately misguided objections to higher-density residential development—the exact problem you and the county council successfully addressed with Columbia Town Center, with support from the folks at Columbia 2.0 and others. The goal: that anyone who wants to can afford the advantages of living and working in a socially, culturally, and economically vibrant urban environment.

To conclude, we need to look beyond the traditional way of thinking (blue state vs. red state, liberal vs. conservative, Maryland vs. Virginia, and so on) and come up with more creative ways to make Maryland a better place without changing what we love about it. As Trevor Greene remarked in the post I linked to above, maybe we should take some things from column A and some things from column B. If FDR could steal ideas from socialism to help save capitalism from itself, maybe it makes sense to steal ideas from free-market libertarianism to help save big-government liberalism from the rut it’s gotten into. FDR was reviled by rabid socialists and rabid capitalists alike, but everybody else seemed to like him just fine. Perhaps that would be true here as well.

In any event I enjoyed the reception, and wish you luck in your future career wherever it may take you. Thanks again for the invite.

Frank

Gonzales used a likely voter pool of 46% Democrats, 40% Republicans, and 14% independents (i.e., unaffiliated voters and members of other parties). Gonzales commented at the time that this division was being “generous to the Democrats” and predicted that the percentage of Republicans in the voting population would actually exceed 40%.

For a separate Ulman-commissioned poll showing Ulman with a 25-point lead (57-32%) pollster Fred Yang used a likely voter pool of 50% Democrats, 33% Republicans, and 17% independents. (Yang also did an alternative 46/40/14 pooling that showed Ulman with a 53-36% lead.)

I got interested in the question of the likely party breakdown of the 2010 electorate and did a series of posts on this, starting with a two-part series (part 1 and part 2) with an initial estimate of the percentages of likely voters and following up after the election (but before I had final turnout data) with a four-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4) that described in detail how I used the R statistical software to generate my estimates.

I recently got reminded of this topic and recalled that I never went back and compared my estimates to those calculated from the official turnout figures. That prompted me to update my Google spreadsheet of Howard County general election turnout data, which computes the values I needed.

So who was right? The table below shows the three estimates of the predicted party breakdown of voters in the 2010 general election, along with the actual party breakdown.

From this we can conclude three things: First, the Gonzales poll was using a likely voter breakdown that was significantly off. However well Republicans did nationally in terms of voter turnout, that success did not translate into comparable turnout in Howard County.

Second, I came the closest of the three in estimating the percentage of independent voters in the general election. Recall from my posts that the percentage of independents voting in Howard County elections has been steadily going up over the years in an almost linear trend, so doing a simple linear regression produced a reasonably good estimate.

Finally, Fred Yang nailed the respective percentages of Democrats and Republicans in the electorate. His estimate of a 25-point lead for Ken Ulman was also right on the money; Ulman’s actual margin of victory was 26 points (63-37%). If Ken Ulman does run for governor then he could do worse than retaining Yang to do his polling again.

August 1998. As Guy Guzzone faces no opposition in the District 3 Democratic primary his would-be Republican opponent, ex-Democrat Wanda Hurt, has her party credentials questioned by her primary opponent, “lifelong Republican” Kirk Halpin. (Hurt protests: “I was miserable as an active Democrat in this county. I suffered a heck of a lot.”) Though Hurt is backed by incumbent Dennis Schrader, the endorsement of the Baltimore Sun goes to Halpin for his “vigor” and “fresh perspective.”¹

The Sun also endorses Christopher Merdon in the District 1 Republican primary, C. Vernon Gray in the District 2 Democratic primary, and Debra Ann Slack-Katz and Allan Kittleman in the District 5 Democratic and Republican primaries respectively. Meanwhile in District 4 self-described “moderate Republican” Greg Fox has a 3–1 fundraising advantage over his general election opponent, Democrat Mary Lorsung, raising hopes of GOP success in November. (Claims Dennis Schrader’s pollster J. Brad Coker, “The county has a slight Republican lean. There have always been a lot of Democrats with conservative feelings.”)

(Gady Epstein, “Hurt finds peace in GOP,” Baltimore Sun, August 16, 1998, 1B; “Halpin for GOP in District 3,” Baltimore Sun, August 19, 1998, 16A; “Merdon in Council District 1,” Baltimore Sun, August 17, 1998, 6A; “Gray in 2nd Council District,” Baltimore Sun, August 18, 1998, 8A; “Slack-Katz, Kittleman in 5th,” Baltimore Sun, August 20, 1998, 18A; “GOP race intensifies in Howard,” Baltimore Sun, August 24, 1998, 1B.)

September 1998. As the primary approaches, Howard County Republicans find themselves in the unlikely position of having vigorous primary battles for county executive and three of five county council seats, with the fights being variously cast as “old Howard” vs. “new Howard,” youth vs. age, conservatives vs. moderates, or just a matter of differing personalities and styles. On primary day itself the Republican nominations go to Christopher Merdon in District 1, Wanda Hurt in District 3, and Allan Kittleman in District 5, with C. Vernon Gray once again easily winning the Democratic nomination in District 2 and Debra Ann Slack-Katz winning the right to face Allan Kittleman in District 5.²

(“GOP offers several choices,” Baltimore Sun, September 13, 1998, 1B; “Parties choose known names,” Baltimore Sun, September 16, 1998, 1B.)

October 1998. The battle in District 3 goes to the air waves, as both Democrat Guy Guzzone and Republican Wanda Hurt air television commercials in what is widely seen as the key race for control of the county council. Meanwhile Hurt and other GOP council candidates join county executive candidate Dennis Schrader in touting their support for education and trying to put behind them Charles Ecker’s controversial decision to not fully fund the Board of Education request and instead go for a small tax cut. (Guzzone dismisses the joint announcement as a “stunt.”)

Republicans also address that other perennial county issue, development, with Allan Kittleman and Christopher Merdon proposing restrictions on residential growth. Schrader praises Kittleman’s and Merdon’s “good ideas” (while declining to fully endorse them) and separately calls for redevelopment of the US Route 1 corridor in eastern Howard. Merdon’s focus on managing development doesn’t help him with the Baltimore Sun however, as the Sun endorses his Democratic opponent George Layman, pointing to his experience with county zoning issues.

In other races, Greg Fox hopes his “high energy” pays off with a win in District 4 against Democratic incumbent Mary Lorsung, and District 5 candidate Debra Ann Slack-Katz laments the Democrats being “late on the draw” in matching the coordinated messaging put forth by the county’s Republican candidates (“I would have liked to have had more exposure, quite honestly”). District 3 candidate Guy Guzzone is the exception among the Democrats, as he continues his campaign blitz of TV ads, mailers, knocking on doors, and personalized notes to voters. (“This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever worked at in all my life,” he observes.) His reward is a Baltimore Sun endorsement; the Sun also endorses incumbents C. Vernon Gray and Mary Lorsung, as well as first-time candidate Allan Kittleman.

(Gady Epstein, “Council control likely to be set in District 3,” Baltimore Sun, October 5, 1998, 1B; Gady Epstein, “Republicans list education goals,” Baltimore Sun, October 7, 1998, 1B; “Two County Council candidates propose standards for growth,” Baltimore Sun, October 15, 1998, 3B; Jamal Watson, “Schrader promises to revitalize portions of the US 1 corridor,” Baltimore Sun, October 22, 3B; “Layman in 1st Council District,” Baltimore Sun, October 26, 1998, 8A; Gady Epstein, “Challenger counting on “high energy”,” Baltimore Sun, October 28, 1998, 1B; “Guzzone for 3rd District seat,” Baltimore Sun, October 28, 18A; “Gray for 2nd Council District,” Baltimore Sun, October 27, 14A; “Re-elect Lorsung in the 4th,” Baltimore Sun, October 29, 20A; “Kittleman for 5th District seat,” Baltimore Sun, October 30, 18A.)

November 1998. Former council member Dennis Schrader’s bet on moving up to the county executive position proves to be a loss twice over for Howard County Republicans, as Democrat James Robey defeats him by a comfortable 55–45% margin and Wanda Hurt, his would-be successor in District 3, is crushed by Guy Guzzone 58–42%. Democratic council incumbents C. Vernon Gray and Mary Lorsung win re-election by equally impressive margins in Columbia-dominated Districts 2 and 4 respectively. Christopher Merdon and Allan Kittleman retain Districts 1 and 5 respectively for Republicans, with Kittleman in particular rolling up the highest vote totals of any council candidate. However Hurt’s loss means that control of the county council passes to the Democrats.³

Although some of the blame for the reversal is attached to Schrader (who performed less well than other Republicans in District 5, home of his GOP primary opponent Charles Feaga), Howard County Republicans and others see the results as reflecting national trends, including most notably the unpopularity of Newt Gingrich and the GOP congressional majority. (“I went down and checked off every Democratic box, even for people I didn’t know,” says one voter. “I think Newt Gingrich is disgusting.”) County GOP chair Carol Arscott comments, “I’ve coined a new phrase: All politics is national. I understand now how the Democrats felt in 1994.”

(Gady Epstein, “Democrat Robey defeats Schrader in executive race,” Baltimore Sun, November 4, 1998, 8D; Gady Epstein, “Democrats seize council,” Baltimore Sun, November 4, 1998, 1D; Gady Epstein, “Tide takes out GOP,” Baltimore Sun, November 5, 1998, 1C.)

December 1998. Republican county executive Charles Ecker steps down and the 3–2 Republican council majority ends, as Democrat James Robey becomes county executive and Democratic incumbents C. Vernon Gray and Mary Lorsung are joined by Guy Guzzone to create a 3–2 Democratic majority on the county council. Gray is elected chair of the council and Lorsung vice chair.

The newly-sworn-in officeholders shy away from talk of radical changes and emphasize the need for unity in addressing challenges facing the county. However, as the Baltimore Sun notes,

Party differences are likely to harden when the council handles redistricting after the 2000 census. The power to draw new councilmanic districts is perhaps the Democrats’ biggest prize for reclaiming the majority, giving the party a chance to solidify its base by shifting conservative voters from the three Democratic-held districts.

(Gady Epstein, “New leaders take charge,” Baltimore Sun, December 8, 1998, 1B.)

Thus did the brief era of Republican dominance in Howard County end, with the GOP having the ill-luck of prevailing in the only county election of the 1990s that had no impact on council redistricting. In the next post we’ll see how the new electoral dynamics affected council redistricting after the 2000 census.

January 1998. The Baltimore Sun notes that 1998 will see “the largest turnover among institutional leaders in Howard’s history,” with Padraic Kennedy retiring as president of the Columbia Association after more than 25 years, Dwight Burrill retiring as president of Howard Community College after 16 years, Charles Ecker leaving the county executive position (due to term limits) after 8 years, James Robey retiring as police chief after 8 years (and 22 years on the force), and Darrel Drown leaving the county council after 8 years. Robey plans to seek the Democratic nomination for county executive, with Republican council members Charles Feaga and Dennis Schrader pitched to seek the position as well, leaving no incumbent Republicans on the council.

(“The Year Ahead in Maryland,” Baltimore Sun, January 1, 1998, 18A.)

March–April 1998. Former county Republican chair Allan Kittleman announces his candidacy for the District 5 council seat of Charles Feaga. The 39-year-old Kittleman touts his long experience in local GOP circles (“I’ve been going to Republican events . . . since I was my children’s age”) as the son of long-time state legislator Robert Kittleman (who notes in turn, “I’m proud of him. He’s a good kid.”). Opposing Kittleman in the GOP primary is Charles Ecker aide and Feaga ally Gail Bates.

In council district 2 former school board chair Susan Cook becomes the latest Republican to go up against C. Vernon Gray in what the Baltimore Sun calls a “political kamikaze mission” (“I am well aware I am the underdog,” acknowledges Cook), and in district 4 first-time Republican candidate K. Gregory Fox looks to unseat incumbent Democrat Mary Lorsung. Republicans Kirk Halpin and Wanda Hurt and Democrat Guy Guzzone vie to win the open council seat vacated by Dennis Schrader in District 3.¹

Meanwhile the competition between Charles Feaga and Dennis Schrader for the GOP nomination for county executive causes tension within the Howard County Republican party, as some suspect local GOP activists Paul and Margaret Rappaport of favoring Democratic candidate James Robey if Dennis Schrader wins the Republican primary. In response the GOP Central Committee asks all GOP candidates (including Margaret Rappaport, who is running again for Clerk of the Circuit Court) to sign a “unity pledge” promising to support only Republican candidates in the general election. Paul Rappaport counters: “I think the Republicans have a good family and they ought to keep it together. They don’t need a contract to do that.”²

(Craig Timberg, “GOP scion seeks office,” Baltimore Sun, March 9, 1998, 1B; Dana Hedgpeth, “Cook to run against Gray,” Baltimore Sun, March 17, 1998, 1B; Gady Epstein, “Hurt kicks off council campaign,” Baltimore Sun, April 9, 1998, 1B; Gady Epstein, “Republican kicks off race to unseat incumbent Gray,” Baltimore Sun, April 26, 1998, 1B; Gady Epstein, “Fox acknowledges an “uphill” candidacy,” Baltimore Sun, April 20, 1998, 12B; Gady Epstein, “GOP asks candidates to vow loyalty,” Baltimore Sun, April 10, 1998, 1B.)

May 1998. Republican council member and county executive candidate Dennis Schrader finds himself in a bind over whether or not to support the Board of Education’s proposed budget or go with Charles Ecker’s proposal for a tax cut and a smaller increase in school funding. In the end Schrader joins fellow Republicans Charles Feaga and Darrel Drown in approving a compromise budget that adds money to Ecker’s request but falls slightly short of the full Board of Education request. They come under attack not only by Democratic candidates James Robey and Guy Guzzone (“Education is the crown jewel in Howard County’s crown, and what they’ve done is tarnish that jewel,” charges Robey) but also by Susan Cook and Wanda Hurt, the Republican council candidates in Districts 2 and 3 respectively (Cook: “Yes, I am a Republican. However, I am a Howard countian first.”).”³

However Cook and Hurt aren’t joined by their fellow council candidate (and Ecker aide) Gail Bates, who launches her campaign for a District 5 seat once thought to be hers to lose (“If there’s such a thing as earning a position on the County Council, she fits the description 100 per cent” claims current District 5 member Charles Feaga) before being challenged by Allan Kittleman.

(Gady Epstein, “Candidate in dilemma as vote nears,” Baltimore Sun, May 10, 1998, 1B; Gady Epstein, “Both parties’ candidates attack school-budget action,” Baltimore Sun, May 21, 1998, 1B; Gady Epstein, “Bates kicks off campaign today with ice cream social,” Baltimore Sun, May 31, 1998, 3B.)

June-July 1998. In District 1 second-time council candidate George Layman faces questions about his commitment to campaigning (“You’re running for a part-time position, but you’re expected to run a full-time campaign,” he complains), especially in a race against 27-year-old Republican candidate Christopher Merdon, who’s supposedly knocked on 6,000 voter doors thus far. Merdon touts his support of “managed growth” and his pledge not to accept contributions from developers (unlike Layman). The District 1 field gets larger, as Merdon is challenged by Timothy McCoy. Layman sees another would-be challenger, James Loar, file at the last minute and then quickly drop out, as Loar doesn’t realize the amount of time and money he’d need to mount a campaign (“I guess in one week I learned a lot”).

Meanwhile Susan Cook and Wanda Hurt reap no benefit from their dissent from the local GOP’s stance on school funding, as the Howard County Education Association votes an (almost) straight Democratic ticket, including an endorsement of Guy Guzzone, Hurt’s opponent in District 3. (Hurt is not surprised: “The teachers union always endorses Democrats, period. Republicans need not apply.”) Guzzone’s bid, along with that of James Robey, is seen by Democrats, including Guzzone himself, as key to their retaking control of the county government from Republicans: “Even if my opponents happen to be good on the education issue or any other issue, the bottom line is they are going to cast a vote for their party on redistricting.”

(Gady Epstein, “Democrat vows intensified bid for council,” Baltimore Sun, June 4, 1998, 3B; Gady Epstein, “Merdon vows not to accept developers’ contributions,” Baltimore Sun, July 8, 1998, 3B; “Retired fire captain enters politics, then thinks better of it,” Baltimore Sun, July 17, 1998, 3B; Gady Epstein, “3 Democrats get teachers’ endorsement for council,” Baltimore Sun, June 4, 1998, 3B; Gady Epstein, “Party aims to regain power,” Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1998, 1B.)

I’ll continue the story of the 1998 county council elections in part 21.

A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it.

When I first started a blog I hosted it at hecker.org using custom blogging software. I later got tired of the management hassles involved, and moved my blog to WordPress.com, using the subdomain blog.hecker.org because I was still hosting other things at hecker.org and couldn’t afford to dedicate the entire domain just to my blog. Since then though the blog has assumed more importance as my public face to the world, and I regretted having a somewhat unusual domain name for it. I’ve therefore decided to adopt the conventional approach and use frankhecker.com as my primary blog name. (As noted above the old name of blog.hecker.org will continue to work, thanks to the magic of HTTP redirects.)

Note that my primary personal email address remains hecker@hecker.org; I have no plans to change that. However I can also receive email at frankhecker.com, so for example sending email to frank@frankhecker.com will get to the same inbox as hecker@hecker.org. I may switch over completely to frankhecker.com for all uses in future, but in the meantime there’s no need to update your address book.

In other news, I’m now on Google Plus so you can add me to one of your circles if you’d like. I’ve been meaning to try Google Plus out before now, but I use Google Apps for my email and related services, and Google Plus wasn’t added to Google Apps until this week. I’ll publish notices of new blog posts to Google Plus, and maybe some other stuff from time to time.

“Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest and Income Inequality” This is an interesting riff on John Rawls and the “veil of ignorance,” starting with the following assumption that “[absent] a policy of income redistribution, capitalism plus stability leads to income disparities.” I wrote a blog post based on this.

Key quote: “Faced with a knowledge of their current state, the people can design a political system that is unstable, thus giving them [a] shot at the lottery in the future. Or they can move toward one that maintains stability, and in doing so establish the rich more securely. For the people to choose the latter route and participate in a government that entrenches the rich, they will demand an egalitarian structure similar to what they would under the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.” (via Paul Kedrosky)

“Occupy Wall Street and the deradicalized Rawls” I think this Will Wilkinson piece makes a good point about John Rawls and his Theory of Justice: “The freedom to buy and sell, to enter into contracts, to start a business, to hire and be hired, to save and invest, to trade freely across borders—none of these are among the basic liberties to be established under [Rawls’s] first principles. … But why? I think it’s as uncomplicated as this: Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t get the answer he was looking for.”

Choice of axioms is key, and choosing the axioms one likes seems a pretty common practice in political philosophy. One good question is: What would a Rawlsian theory of justice look like if economic liberties were included in the basic liberties?

“Income Inequality Is Hobbling the Middle Class” This is a fairly typical discussion of issues related to income inequality, but is noteworthy for pointing to a paper with a technical discussion of inter-generational mobility. (via Andrew Sullivan, as is the next one.)

“What kind of mobility matters?” This is a companion piece to the previous one, focusing on the idea of “absolute mobility,” i.e., where people have rising real incomes (both within their own lives and relative to their parents) even though their position relative to others does not change. The claim is essentially that the problem is not rising income inequality as such but rather the lack of absolute mobility.

How can Maryland promote job growth and the well-being of its citizens as the economy languishes and Federal spending shows every sign of declining, never to rise again? Should Maryland seek to model itself on its next-door rival, Virginia, or even on Texas and other states in the south touting themselves as “business-friendly” destinations? Or is there another way to grow Maryland and make it a better place to live and work, one that takes into account Maryland’s own characteristics and doesn’t try to make it into something it’s not and never could be?

I’ve been thinking about this a while, and was moved to write by the publication by Blueprint Maryland of a draft report [PDF] summarizing comments by people attending a series of roundtables on how Maryland can adapt to the changing economy. (One of these roundtable events was held last month in Turf Valley, and another at the BWI Marriott. Perhaps some of the readers of this blog attended and could comment on them?)¹

The draft report is well-worth reading in whole but by its nature it’s somewhat disjointed, reflecting as it does the many and varied comments of the people who attended the roundtables. Rather than discuss each of the many ideas contained within I prefer to step back a little and try to provide a high-level vision of what I think Maryland should be doing to transition to a new 21st-century economy. So without further ado here’s my own “napkin sketch” of what a blueprint for Maryland could look like:

First, although we can and should learn from the experience of Virginia and other states we should ditch the idea that all we have to do is make Maryland more like Virginia. Socially, politically, and economically Maryland is not like Virginia and likely never will be. I moved to Maryland from out of this area, and if I wanted to live in a state like Virginia I would have either gone there to begin with or crossed the Potomac many years ago. I’m sure the same is true of many people who currently live here.

Virginia does what it does very well, and has a well-established “state brand” that reflects its various aspects: relatively socially and politically conservative, and combining high-tech modernity with “business-friendliness” in the sense usually used in the US, e.g., having low taxes, anti-union measures, and so on. There’s no way Maryland is going to be able to match Virginia in those aspects any time soon, and even if it did historical perceptions would likely still hold sway and limit Maryland’s competitiveness in attracting businesses and people looking for a Virginia-like environment. Why settle for a (pale) copy when you can have the original?

So what we should focus on in Maryland? I think we should take our cue from a statement in the draft roundtable report: “A key issue raised [was] the over-regulation in Maryland, and this appeared to be an even greater concern than the high taxes.” People certainly don’t like taxes (as evidenced by the recent discussion of a proposed gas tax), but politically there’s little or no chance of Maryland turning into a low-tax haven. So instead of obsessing about taxes why don’t we instead put a major focus on reducing the regulatory burden? This could cover not just the traditional concerns of businesses large and small, but also address regulatory issues that affect both businesses in emerging industries and entrepreneurial individuals (freelancers, people with home businesses, street vendors, and so on), neither of which groups are necessarily well-represented by the existing business lobbies.²

At the same time we could take the taxes we’re not going to be reducing and focus on spending them on the core public goods for which we have government in the first place, including most notably public safety, public infrastructure, and the creation of a healthy, well-educated population that has the personal and family security to take the life chances that will be required to be successful in a 21st-century global economy that would otherwise be very stressful for the middle class and the poor.

If we’re not going to try and make Maryland into “Virginia-lite,” what should we model ourselves on? Is it even possible to combine a vibrant, dynamic, and relatively unregulated free-market economy with a robust social safety net and other government-funded measures to benefit the average citizen? Wouldn’t that amount to an example of politically “crossing the streams”? “It would be bad,” as Egon Spengler warned, even if didn’t result in every molecule in our bodies exploding at the speed of light. But as those who’ve seen Ghostbusters can testify, the plucky band of heroes did indeed cross the streams to great success, averting a “disaster of biblical proportions.”

In this case there’s an “existence proof” (as the mathematicians say) not in any US state, but rather in the country of Denmark. For quite some time now various people, including many of the libertarian persuasion like Will Wilkinson, have been touting Denmark as showing that you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to free markets. Denmark is rated as high or higher as the US on measures of economic freedom published by the Heritage Foundation and others, but at the same time has generously-funded social insurance, public education, and so on; in fact, strictly speaking Denmark is actually significantly economically freer than the US when it comes to regulatory measures, but gets ranked lower than it otherwise might be because of its much higher level of taxation and government spending.

Some people object to comparing Denmark to the US because it’s such a small country. But comparing it to Maryland makes more sense; they’re about the same size (16,641 square miles for Denmark vs. 12,407 for Maryland) and have about the same number of people (5.6 million vs. 5.8 million). When it comes to various measures of economic well-being though Denmark takes the lead: Maryland’s per-capita income is relatively high at $43,500, but Denmark’s is even higher at $56,147; Denmark also has a lower unemployment rate (recently 6.6% vs. 7.5% for Maryland), less income inequality, with a Gini coefficient of 0.25 vs. Maryland’s 0.44 (itself actually fairly low in comparison to the rest of the US), and a higher rate of economic mobility than the US (i.e., the ability of someone to make it from a lower socioeconomic class to a higher one).³

Of course there are also significant differences between Denmark and Maryland: Maryland’s freedom of action is hampered by the US Federal government (Denmark is a member of the European Union but did not adopt the euro), the US and even Maryland political climate is much more hostile to high government spending (the center-right party that until recently ruled Denmark would likely be considered raving socialists in the US context), and Denmark is much more ethnically homogeneous than Maryland (with over 90% of the population being native Danes). That limits the extent to which Maryland could adopt generous social programs to complement a laissez-faire regulatory framework.

But even given that, I think the key to finding answers for Maryland’s economy is starting with the right questions, and I think “how can Maryland be more like Virginia” is the wrong question to ask. I think a much better question would be, how can Maryland be more like Denmark?

Bookstaber is principally concerned with instability that affects an entire society, in which everyone without exception “[knows] they might end up with the short end of the stick with the next roll of the dice, and that whatever they acquire will likely be transitory.” Such instability encompasses the potential or actual destruction of or damage to a country’s core political, economic, and other institutions, and in the limit (as in Bookstaber’s example of Israel) can include threats to a country’s very existence. By contrast a country experiencing stability is one in which the structure and institutions of society remain relatively fixed over an extended period of time.

How does this relate to countries with a capitalist economic system? To quote Bookstaber, “Absent a policy of income redistribution, capitalism plus stability leads to income disparities.” To expand on this: People vary widely in their inborn and subsequently nurtured talents (including such general characteristics as intelligence, conscientiousness, and drive) and in a meritocratic capitalist system those wide differences in talents will lead to wide differences in income. Those who can accrue surplus income (i.e., beyond that needed for basic needs) have the opportunity to invest that income and build wealth, which can then in turn produce more surplus income; others who have to (or want to) spend all they make will tend to fall behind. Finally, those with enough wealth can achieve enhanced influence over the political process, influence that can be used to “tilt the playing field” so as to maintain or further increase their income and wealth advantage over others.

If a country’s structures and institutions remain stable over an extended period of time without any major changes, these factors have more time to work and thus income disparities will widen further: The naturally-favored can pass on their advantages to their children via inheritance of both wealth and talents, those with wealth can compound it over time, and entrenched political parties and institutions allow more opportunities for “rent-seeking” (to use the technical term).

One response to this is simply to say, so what? Yes, capitalism provides an opportunity for the skilled and energetic to improve their own financial situation and for the most talented to amass considerable wealth, well beyond the dreams of most; however such people have earned what they have, and in any case their entrepreneurial innovation has provided jobs for everyone else and access to better and cheaper goods and services for all, including those whom we (perhaps mistakenly) think of as poor.¹

In this view of the world the existence of income disparities is not a problem and could never be a problem, no matter how wide they might become; it’s simply an indication that capitalism is working as advertised. However Bookstaber doesn’t seem to hold this view (for whatever reason), and for the sake of argument I’ll accept his premise and continue on.

Bookstaber next considers the theory of a just society promoted by the political philosopher John Rawls, and in particular the concept of the “veil of ignorance,” essentially a philosophical take on the commonplace observation that “there but for the grace of God go I”: If we imagine an ideal society but have no idea what our initial place in that society might be or what talents we might possess, we will (according to Rawls) come to conclude that for such a society to be just it must have certain features, including particularly measures directed to improve the lot of the least-advantaged within society.²

Leaving aside any philosophical issues with Rawls’s argument, the “veil of ignorance” idea has a major practical shortcoming, namely that it’s hard for us to imagine ourselves in the position of others. We tend to take our own talents and other personal characteristics for granted, to imagine that other people are pretty much like us (or at least could be more like us if only they tried), and to create a self-narrative in which any advantages we’ve accrued are justified as a natural outgrowth of our own hard work and self-discipline. It’s difficult for many people to accept the premise of the veil of ignorance, even as a thought experiment, and thus difficult to accept Rawls’s conclusions about how a just society should be organized.

Bookstaber proposes a modification of the veil of ignorance: Assume that we do know what talents and advantages we possess relative to others, but because of societal instability we do not know how we’ll fare in the future. (In other words, everyone, including those most favored, assumes that “whatever system they put forward will be beset by occasional exogenous shocks that destroy wealth . . . [and] there is nothing they can do to affect the occurrence of the shocks or their result.”) Bookstaber sees this having an effect similar to that of the veil of ignorance: If people don’t know that their current position is secure, they’ll be more likely to support a more egaltarian vision of society and measures to promote the same.

Bookstaber then concludes with some thoughts about this being the possible basis of a social contract: “Faced with a knowledge of their current state, the people can design a political system that is unstable, thus giving them at shot at the lottery in the future.” Otherwise they can opt for stability and the possibility that such a system would be dominated by entrenched wealth and privilege (in which case Bookstaber claims that people would opt for egalitarian measures, though I’m not sure how or why this necessarily follows).

So what’s the use of this? Bookstaber seems to think that he’s provided an interesting twist to Rawls’s theory, and I will concede that it does have some advantages over the classic veil of ignorance: It’s hard to imagine being other than who we are, but it’s easy (or at least easier) to imagine ourselves being adversely affected by societal instability. However in the end this seems to come back to another commonplace observation: If there are people who’ve made out well under a particular system then they’ll be very motivated to maintain that system without change. (This is humorously captured in a recent New Yorker cover, in which tycoons hold their own counter-protest, with signs stating “Keep things precisely as they are,” “I’m good, thanks,” and similar sentiments.) That will only change if circumstances change.

The question is, if we think things need to change—that America in effect needs more instability to shake up the system—how likely is that to happen, and how might it (or, for that matter, should it) happen? I’ll come back to that question in a future post.

July 1996. The Howard County Council considers a proposal to establish a separate commission to devise council redistricting plans, as opposed to having the council create plans itself. The proposal envisions a seven-member commission with three members appointed by the Democratic and Republican Central Committees and a “tie-breaker” member appointed by the council. The commission’s plan would be presented to the council, which could adopt it as-is, modify it, or create a new plan; however the commission plan would automatically go into effect in the event of a council stalemate.

The council seems generally receptive to the proposal. Although the charter review commission recommends against the proposal, its chair Thomas Meachum supports it as providing an alternative to potential deadlock and making the process less partisan: “It doesn’t remove, but it dilutes the political aspects of redistricting.” And in any case, as Kenneth Stevens notes in testimony before the council, “You’d have to bring in aliens from outer space to get politics out of the process.”

The council approves placing the redistricting commission question on the November ballot as a county charter change for the voters to consider. However council Democrats C. Vernon Gray and Mary Lorsung torpedo other proposed charter changes, denying council Republicans the 4–1 majority needed to place the changes on the ballot. One item shot down is a proposal by Darrel Drown to increase from 10,000 to 20,000 the number of signatures required to put the termination of Howard County’s charter status to a referendum; Mary Lorsung claims, “If the government of the county were in such bad shape that you could get 10,000 signatures, then things are in bad enough shape to go out and get the opinion of [voters].”¹

(Craig Timberg, “Redistricting commission wins support,” Baltimore Sun, July 16, 1996, 1B; Craig Timberg, “Council Democrats stymie the GOP,” Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1996, 1B.)

October 1996. The Baltimore Sun urges Howard County voters to reject the redistricting commission proposal (Question B) for not meeting the goal of getting politics out of redistricting: “The commission would be just as political as the County Council, which now draws the lines. . . . The proposal, Question B, falsely gives an impression of removing politics from redistricting. Voters should reject it.” The Sun recommends approval of the other twelve proposed charter changes, including one to make all pronouns in the charter gender-neutral.

(“Ballot questions,” Baltimore Sun, October 30, 1996, 20A.)

November 1996. Former council candidate John Taylor joins the Baltimore Sun in urging rejection of Question B, the redistricting commission proposal; Taylor objects to the provision disallowing any voter referendum on redistricting plans: “There is an ominous trend lately in some quarters to attempt to eliminate or restrict the right of “we the people” to participate in major decisions that affect us all.” Tom Flynn, a member of the charter review commission, calls attention to the fact (not specifically mentioned in materials provided to voters) that the members of the redistricting commission will not be independent citizens but rather will be picked by the two major parties: “By defining the members of the commission on political grounds, you really cut out a lot of qualified people.”

Ignoring the various concerns expressed, Howard County voters vote yes on Question B and establishment of the redistricting commission; they reject four of the other proposed changes, including (by an 84% majority) one which would have corrected a typographical error and changed the term “Appeal Boards” to “Board of Appeals.” However the voters do support making the charter gender-neutral.²

The section of the county charter dealing with council district boundaries is changed to read as follows:³

The Council shall appoint, by resolution, not later than April 1 of the year after each decennial census date, a Councilmanic Redistricting Commission. The Central Committee of each political party which polled at least twenty-five per centum of the total vote cast for all the candidates for the Office of County Executive in the last preceding general election shall nominate three persons to serve on the Commission. The Council shall appoint all such nominees as members of the Commission as well as one additional member of the Commission. The Council shall appoint the Chairperson of the Commission from among the Commission members. No person shall be eligible for appointment to the Commission who holds elective office.

By October 15 of the year in which the Commission is appointed, the Commission shall prepare a plan of Councilmanic Districts and shall present that plan to the Council. Within thirty days after receiving the plan of the Commission, the Council shall hold a public hearing on the plan. If by March 15 of the year following submission of the plan, no ordinance re-establishing the boundaries of the Councilmanic Districts has been enacted, then the plan as submitted by the Commission shall become law. Any Councilmanic District established in accordance with this Article shall be compact, contiguous, substantially equal in population, and have common interest as a result of geography, occupation, history, or existing political boundaries. Any ordinance establishing Councilmanic Districts shall be exempt from referendum.

The Board of Supervisors of Elections shall take any necessary steps to implement any such revisions of the Councilmanic District Boundaries so adopted.

(Dan Morse, “Charter changes to face voters,” Baltimore Sun, November 4, 1996, 1B; Dan Morse, “9 county charter changes approved,” Baltimore Sun, November 6, 1996, 5B; Dan Morse, “Correct a typo? No way, voters say,” Baltimore Sun, November 7, 1996, 1B; “Howard County Charter,” Article II, Section 202, paragraph f.1)

In part 20 of this series we’ll see which party gained control of the council in 1998 and thus positioned itself to more effectively influence the work of the redistricting commission for the post-2000 redistricting effort.

February 1994. Howard County voter registration figures show Democrats holding a significant edge in party affiliation in four of the five new council districts: Democrats outnumber Republicans 48%–38% in District 1 (Ellicott City and Elkridge), 54%–30% in District 2 (east Columbia), 48%–35% in District 3 (southeast Columbia, Savage and North Laurel), and 54%–31% in District 4 (west Columbia). Only in District 5 (western Howard) do Republicans have a voter registration advantage, with a slim 44%–43% majority.

However District 1 incumbent Republican Darrel Drown remains optimistic: “Any time it’s 1.4-to-1 or less [Democrats to Republicans], we have a chance.” By Drown’s criterion Districts 1, 3, and 5 are winnable for Republicans, with only District 2 and 4 being Democratic locks.

(James M. Coram, “Democrats have the edge in new council districts,” Baltimore Sun, February 20, 1994, 1B.)

May-August 1994. District 4 Democratic incumbent Paul Farragut decides not to run for re-election, and recommends his assistant Mary Lorsung as his successor; however she must first face James Kraft (who’s endorsed by District 2 incumbent C. Vernon Gray) in the Democratic primary. On the Republican side the prospect of an open seat brings out three Republican hopefuls: Robert O’Brien, Riaz Rana, and Mary Ann Wilkinson.

In District 1 Darrel Drown seeks re-election, building on his upset win in 1990 over Angela Beltram and his success in promoting a 1992 county charter change to impose a three-term limit on county council members; Democrat George Layman runs unopposed to challenge him. C. Vernon Gray seeks to extend his winning streak in District 2, going for a fourth term as council member. Gray gets a primary challenge from Kathryn Mann, while on the GOP side Gary Prestrianni and Evelyn Tanner vie for the opportunity to take Gray on in November.¹

(David Michael Ettlin, “Surprising Democrats, Farragut says he won’t seek re-election to council,” Baltimore Sun, May 12, 1994, 1B; Erik Nelson, “Democrat Lorsung takes boss’ advice to run for his County Council seat,” Baltimore Sun, May 22, 1994, 11B; “Endorsements in Council District 4,” Baltimore Sun, August 25, 1994, 14A; James M. Coram, “Drown announces bid for re-election,” Baltimore Sun, June 7, 1994, 7B; James M. Coram, “Howard voters show overwhelming support for three-term limit on council,” Baltimore Sun, November 4, 1992, 24A; “Howard Council’s District 1 Race,” Baltimore Sun, August 22, 1994, 8B; “Endorsements for Council District 2,” Baltimore Sun, August 23, 1994, 10A.)

After having barely lost to Shane Pendergrass in 1990, Republican Dennis Schrader runs again for a council seat, now that Pendergrass is seeking a seat in the House of Delegates and redistricting has lowered the relative Democratic voter registration advantage in the district. Facing off against Schrader is first-time candidate Charles Acquard. Finally, in District 5 Republican Charles Feaga prepares to run again for a third term on the council. He’s opposed by his old nemesis, anti-growth activist John Taylor, who in 1990 challenged Feaga in the Republican primary but is now running as a Democrat.²

Meanwhile Charles Ecker faces no opposition in the Republican primary for county executive, while on the Democratic side “establishment” candidate Sue-Ellen Hantman is challenged at the last minute by slow-growth activist Susan Gray (“I’m the consummate outsider; I’m on a lot of people’s dart boards”). Ecker looks forward to the match-up: “It’ll be good to watch.”

(“Endorsements for Council District 3,” Baltimore Sun, August 24, 1994, 12A; “Endorsements in Council District 5,” Baltimore Sun, August 26, 16A; James M. Coram, “Hantman to challenge executive,” Baltimore Sun, June 20, 1994, 1B; James M. Coram, ““Treasurer” tapped for Gray’s last-minute filing,” Baltimore Sun, July 6, 1994, 1B.)

September 1994. Susan Gray wins the right to face Charles Ecker in a convincing 53%–47% win over Democratic Central Committee chair Sue-Ellen Hantman. C. Vernon Gray (no relation) continues his record of electoral success with a 2–1 primary victory over challenger Kathryn Mann (another Democratic Central Committee member) in District 2, with Democrat-turned-Republican Evelyn Tanner slated to face him in the general election. In District 4 Paul Farragut’s annointed successor Mary Lorsung defeats Joseph Kraft, C. Vernon Gray’s favorite (and yet another former Democratic Central Committee member), while former executive Riaz Rana tops the poll in a 3-way race for the Republican nomination. Somewhat surprised to be facing Susan Gray instead of Sue-Ellen Hantman, Ecker ponders whether to “go negative” in portraying Gray as a single-issue anti-growth candidate with no relevant experience (“If you handed Ms. Gray a [county] budget book, she would have no idea where to begin,” comments Ecker ally Darrel Drown), while Gray campaigns not only for herself but for a referendum to change the way the county does zoning.³

(James M. Coram and Lan Nguyen, “Susan Gray carries Democratic vote for executive,” Baltimore Sun, September 14, 1994, 1B; James M. Coram, “Ecker weighs strategy for surprise foe,” Baltimore Sun, September 16, 1994, 1B.)

October 1994. County growth and what to do about it is once again on the agenda, as John Taylor (“I don’t think everybody has a God-given right to high-density zoning”) squares off against Charles Feaga over the proposed referendum allowing county resident to vote on zoning changes (“You never govern by majority on individual rights,” counters Feaga). In other districts Republican challengers pick up the theme: District 4 hopeful Riaz Rana expresses support for the referendum while in District 2 Evelyn Tanner tries to tie C. Vernon Gray to developers and advocates splitting the zoning board from the county council in order to “solve a lot of ethical problems.” Meanwhile some Columbia residents push for incorporation as a way to provide a “democratic government” and address perceived deficiencies of the Columbia Association,

(Erik Nelson, “Growth passes crime as top issue in council race,” Baltimore Sun, October 23, 1994, 1B; Adam Sachs, “Candidates hedge on incorporation of Columbia,” Baltimore Sun, October 27, 1994, 1B; Adam Sachs, “Columbia to ask experts, scholars for incorporation information,” Baltimore Sun, October 28, 1994, 3B.)

November 1994. Despite concerns raised by a Democratic edge in voter registration and a redistricting plan designed to favor Democrats, Howard County Republicans have their most successful election in modern Howard County history, as Democrats cross party lines to elect Charles Ecker as county executive (“I couldn’t have done it without them”) and put a Republican majority on the council, as Darrel Drown in District 1 and Dennis Schrader in District 3 join District 5 incumbent Charles Feaga. C. Vernon Gray returns to the council, and Mary Lorsung’s victory keeps Columbia (and only Columbia) in Democratic hands.⁴

Even as she goes down to a crushing defeat Democratic county executive candidate Susan Gray exults in the overwhelming passage of a referendum to increase voter power over zoning decisions (“I’m ecstatic for the people of this county”), a vote that Charles Feaga decries as having “destroyed long-range planning in Howard County”. Whether the Republican council majority will mark a real change in county affairs remains to be seen, as the Republican council members proclaim their independence and willingness to put the people of Howard County first; as Dennis Schrader notes, “No one said to me, “Please run so we can have three Republicans on the council”.”

(James M. Coram, “Redistricting gives the edge to Democrats,” Baltimore Sun, November 4, 1994, 1B; James M. Coram and Erik Nelson, “Democrats cross to vote for incumbent,” Baltimore Sun, November 9, 1994, 1B; Erik Nelson, “Defeated candidate claims win,” Baltimore Sun, November 10, 1994, 1B; James M. Coram, “Council has GOP majority but predicts little change,” Baltimore Sun, November 13, 1994, 1B.)

The 1993 redistricting plan, based as it was on a Democratic proposal, was pitched as ensuring Democratic dominance of the county council for a decade, but instead became the basis for Republican dominance of county government. In part 19 we’ll follow an attempt to change the way council redistricting is done and help avoid the stalemates and partisan disputes that marked the post-1990 redistricting effort.

UPDATE: Corrected the note about the effect of term limits on current council members.

Ken Stevens (ksteve8@verizon.net) - 2011-10-03 19:16

It’s not true that the three term limit for Council members would prohibit Courtney Watson from running for reelection to her current seat in 2014. She was first elected to that seat in 2006 and is now in her second term. There may be speculation about her running for County Executive instead, but it’s not because she can’t legally run for reelection to the Council. Otherwise, thanks for doing a good rundown on the 1994 local election.

hecker - 2011-10-03 22:18

Ken, thanks very much for the correction. I was unfortunately led astray by the page on Courtney Watson published by the Maryland State Archives, which lists her as having served on the council since 2002. I’ve written them to correct the error, and have also corrected the note in this blog post.

January 1993. The council again divides 3–2, but with a twist this time: Republican council member Charles Feaga joins Democrats Shane Pendergrass and Paul Farragut to try to forge a compromise plan based on the original Democratic-sponsored plan approved by the council via a resolution (the one struck down by Judge Sybert) and a plan drawn up by Republican Michael Deets for the Columbia Association that was previously submitted to the council but never considered. On the losing side are Republican Darrel Drown and Democrat C. Vernon Gray. Gray simply wants to address the concerns expressed by Republican county executive Charles Ecker in his veto of the Democratic plan, while Drown objects to considering the Columbia Association plan instead of the plan submitted by Ecker (“If you want to talk compromise, talk about the Republican map”) and fears his Ellicott City district being split up, with part being joined to Elkridge. Feaga dismisses his concerns: “I did get the idea from the public testimony that Elkridge wanted to be linked to Ellicott City.” Reading the tea leaves, the Baltimore Sun predicts that Darrel Drown is “destined for the loss column” with Charles Feaga “willing to let Mr. Drown take the fall.”

(James M. Coram, “New effort planned on redistricting,” Baltimore Sun, January 8, 1993, 1B; “Redistricting War Dance,” Baltimore Sun, January 14, 1993, 16A.)

February-May 1993. As the council members continue private negotiations over redistricting (spearheaded by Shane Pendergrass and Darrel Drown), the Baltimore Sun assesses the overall accomplishments (or lack thereof) of the Howard County Council: “The most appropriate adjective to describe the council’s current state would be rudderless. . . . Divisiveness across party lines has resulted in strange alliances as council members have become increasingly consumed by individual, and often competing, interests.”

As the private negotiations drag on, Barbara Feaga, Board of Elections administrator (and wife of Charles Feaga), worries about preparations for the 1994 elections: “We are at a dead stop. . . . We can’t make any plans.” The sticking point is making changes to the boundaries for Shane Pendergrass’s District 1; Darrel Drown comments, “We’re down to the last 500 voters. The battleground is Shane’s district. They want to win, and we want to win.” Michael Deets for the Republicans and David Marker for the Democrats act as go-betweens shuttling proposed plans between Pendergrass and Drown, with both sites claiming the other is holding up the process. Marker comments, “Waiting for the Republicans is like waiting for Godot,” while Deets counters, “The last I knew, we had come up with two different maps that we submitted to Shane.”¹

As June approaches (along with a June 30 budget deadline for expenses related to redistricting) the private negotiations fail, and each party once again plans to submit competing plans. (“Every [Democratic] map I looked at looked gerrymandered,” claims Charles Feaga.) Shane Pendergrass claims to have addressed the concerns expressed by Charles Ecker in his veto statement, but Darrel Drown begs to disagree: “This is not a compromise. I assume it’s raw politics. . . . I thought we were narrowing it down and all of a sudden Shane called and said she was submitting a map [for a vote].” Ecker refuses to tip his hand: “We’ll see what happens with the council. Then I’ll do what I have to do.”

(“Mavericks on the Loose,” Baltimore Sun, February 23, 1993, 2A; James M. Coram, “Council can’t agree on districts,” Baltimore Sun, April 26, 1993, 1B; James M. Coram, “6 months of redistricting negotiations end with council still at loggerheads,” Baltimore Sun, June 1, 1993, 1B.)

June 1993. The council considers redistricting legislation but it takes a back seat to formulating a council response to the veto by Charles Ecker of a county-wide smoking ban. Nevertheless the two parties seem close to a compromise that would see the Democratic plan adopted with minor changes. Shane Pendergrass sees it as finding “common ground” but Darrel Drown vents (“I think we gave a whole lot, got a whole little”) while Charles Feaga sympathizes (“Darrel has every right in the world to be very, very upset”) but is ultimately resigned (“We’ve got more important things to do now. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the county, but I feel I represent the county as a whole. [District] boundaries mean very little.”)²

Feaga also dismisses concern by the League of Women Voters that the public isn’t being provided enough information about the compromise plan (“Most people don’t care about their district that much. I don’t think you can create interest in a thing like this.”), with Shane Pendergrass claiming that the council was doing enough (“We have done our normal advertising, but we couldn’t notify 200,000 people personally”). The Baltimore Sun sees hope of the council “trying to put an end to the petty, partisan way in which they have handled this affair.”

(James M. Coram, “Redistricting, smoking on agenda of County Council hearing,” Baltimore Sun, June 21, 1993, 3B; James M. Coram, “Delay urged for council redistricting,” Baltimore Sun, June 22, 1993, 1B; “Border Wars,” Baltimore Sun,” June 24, 1993, 20A.)

July 1993. As the council moves to approve the compromise plan, Darrel Drown, whose district is more affected than any other, tries one last time to make a minor change (“the numbers are minimal—maybe 200 to 250 people”). Although his amendment is approved (along with another minor change proposed by Charles Feaga), Drown votes against the final plan: “I think we’ve done too much shifting around so I think I’ll have to vote no to this.” However, Charles Feaga joins Paul Farragut, C. Vernon Gray, and Shane Pendergrass to approve the plan by a veto-proof 4–1 majority. The plan goes to Charles Ecker for his signature, with Feaga and Farragut recommending that the council stop trying to draw up its own plans and create a “citizens committee” to make future redistricting recommendations.³

(James M. Coram, “Howard’s long redistricting saga nears end,” Baltimore Sun, July 6, 1993, 3B; Erik Nelson, “Redrawn districts approved,” Baltimore Sun, July 7, 1993, 1B.)

Thus did the battle over redistricting end, after more than two years (and five blog posts!). In part 18 I’ll review how the new district lines affected the 1994 council elections.

August 1992. The last day of the month is the first day of the trial in the Circuit Court of Howard County, as counsel put forth their arguments in front of Judge Cornelius Sybert, Jr. Representing the plaintiffs, Howard County Republicans David Maier and Louis Pope, are former county solicitor Thomas Lloyd and fellow former solicitor Richard J. Wilkinson, both Democrats. As for the co-defendants, representing the Board of Elections is Charles Reese, and representing the County Council are former US Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, former Georgetown Law professor Roger Titus, and their associate Sondra Block.

Thomas Lloyd contends that those who wrote the relevant county charter language intended that there be wide public input to redistricting and a deliberative process to specify the final district lines. He contrasts the lengthy process (including public hearings) needed to enact council bills with the ability of the council to adopt resolutions on short notice with minimal public notice or input. He further points out that, unlike bills, resolutions leave the public no avenues of recourse once adopted, since resolutions cannot be vetoed, challenged before put in effect, or made subject to a referendum. The end result, Lloyd claims, is that citizens are being denied due process when it comes to a fundamental county government decision (i.e., council redistricting) that affects them.

Benjamin Civiletti responds in essence that redistricting is too important to be subjected to excessive challenges and delays: “Maryland does not want an impasse, and Howard County people don’t want an impasse.” Roger Titus points out that the county charter doesn’t explicitly state that redistricting plans are subject to executive veto or to referendum, and notes the distinction between “establish” and “enact,” and between “adopted” and “enacted”: the charter uses the former words in association with redistricting, consistent with their being “established” and “adopted” via a resolution rather than “enacted” as a bill. He also argues that the “temporary administrative” nature of resolutions is consistent with the fact that redistricting is not a permanent action but must be repeated at least every ten years.¹

(James M. Coram, “Salvos begin in legal skirmish over council districts,” Baltimore Sun, September 2, 1992, 2H)

November 1992. Judge Cornelius Sybert, Jr., renders his verdict: The council resolution establishing the new council district lines is “constitutionally defective and invalid” and the Board of Elections is enjoined from putting it into effect. Judge Sybert bases his ruling on two key points: that a 10-year redistricting plan is not “temporary” and that it is not “administrative” in nature, and thus it is outside the scope of those actions that the council can take via a resolution. C. Vernon Gray responds, “I respectfully disagree,” and points to the use of council resolutions for road closings and other matters not necessarily temporary in practice. He also promises he’ll be back to court: “We just have to appeal it, I think. . . . We have to uphold the prerogative and the right of council. The county executive has no role in a legislative function.” Charles Ecker pushes back: “As I interpret the charter, the county executive does have a role. That’s the only reason I was glad to see it go to court. It’s a good government issue—there have to be checks and balances.”

(James M. Coram, “Howard district plan is voided,” Baltimore Sun, November 10, 1992, 1B)

December 1992. Council Democrats discuss what to do next, as a Baltimore Sun editorial points out the downside for Democrats in appealing the ruling: “An appeals court ruling supporting the Sybert verdict . . . could weaken Democrats by forcing many decisions to be made by bills, which would then be subject to veto by the county executive.” Democratic members Paul Farragut and Shane Pendergrass suggest buying some time by filing a Notice of Appeal, and then have the council decide whether to proceed or not, while fellow Democrat C. Vernon Gray seems intent on following the appeals process through to the bitter end: “This is clearly an issue that can only be resolved by the judiciary.” Covering all the bases, Roger Titus sends the council a set of price quotes ($23,000 to $34,000 for a two-step appeals process and $13,000 to $19,000 for skipping a step and going straight to the top, with filing a one-sentence Notice of Appeal a relative bargain), while Republican council members Charles Feaga and Darrel Drown suggest dropping the whole appeal idea and instead appointing a bipartisan committee (equally divided between Republicans and Democrats) to draw up a compromise redistricting plan.

Shane Pendergrass and Paul Farragut send a memorandum to invite their Republican colleagues to sit down in a council work session to start to resolve the impasse, but Charles Feaga and Darrel Drown continue to promote the idea of an outside committee. Feaga notes, “When management and unions don’t get along, they sometimes bring in someone else. . . . It’s the only reasonable thing to do at this point.” The legal maneuvering continues: Although county solicitor Barbara Cook previously agreed with Charles Ecker that redistricting required a bill (not a resolution), Democrats now want her to take over the appeal in order to save the county the expense of paying outside counsel in the form of Benjamin Civiletti and his colleagues Roger Titus and Sondra Block. Meanwhile Republicans are filing their own appeal of Judge Sybert’s ruling allowing the council to be a party to the suit in the first place.

As the year ends, the two sides remain at loggerheads, and Shane Pendergrass observes, “I don’t know what we’re going to do. I know we have to stop writing memos and start talking.”

(“Howard’s Flawed Redistricting,” Baltimore Sun, December 1, 1992, 12A; James M. Coram, “Council, split over court’s invalidation of redistricting plan, initiates appeal,” Baltimore Sun, December 2, 1992, 5B; James M. Coram, “Solicitor asked to appeal redistricting,” Baltimore Sun, December 10, 1992, 7C; James M. Coram, “Redistricting compromise sought,” Baltimore Sun, December 16, 1992, 6B.)

Winston Churchill is reported to have once said, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” Will the county council agree, as the redistricting effort stretches into a third calendar year? Stayed tuned for the answer in part 17 in this series.

February 1992. Howard County Republicans, in the persons of David Maier and Louis Pope, prepare to sue the Board of Elections for accepting the Democratic redistricting plan passed by the council as a resolution (after county executive Charles Ecker vetoed it when passed as a bill). Past and present county solicitors disagree on the bill vs. resolution issue: Current solicitor Barbara Cook says a bill is required, while former solicitor Timothy Welsh had in 1985 opined that a resolution would suffice.²

Meanwhile Democratic council member Shane Pendergrass objects to Ecker aide (and county lobbyist) Gail Bates attending the press conference announcing the lawsuit: “You would think our Annapolis lobbyist would be in the capital trying to get help with the budget. She seems to be making poor choices about how to spend her time.” In response County GOP chair Carol Arscott points to the $7,600 the council spent getting legal advice from former US Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, especially given that the suit by Maier and Pope is being handled on a pro bono basis by local zoning lawyer Thomas Lloyd (a Democrat, and also a former county solicitor).

Although the county is named as a co-defendant in the suit, Ecker makes it clear to Lloyd that he’s not going to mount a defense: “I’m going to side with [Lloyd]. I agree with the suit. If the council wants to defend it, that’s up to them.”

(James M. Coram, “Republicans to sue election board over council boundaries,” Baltimore Sun, February 12, 1992, 5H; James M. Coram, “Ecker administration won’t contest redistricting lawsuit,” Baltimore Sun, February 26, 1992, 2H.)

March-June 1992. The Howard County Board of Elections decides to defend the lawsuit filed in Circuit Court by David Maier and Louis Pope, which alleges that the board’s acceptance of the new district lines from the council resolution was invalid. Unlike the earlier 2–1 party-line vote, this decision is unanimous, with the board instructing its attorney, Charles Reese, to prepare its defense. The county council gets its own lawyer, deciding in a by-now-familiar 3–2 party-line vote to pay Benjamin Civiletti $150 an hour to continue his legal arguments in support of the position that a council resolution is sufficient to adopt a council redistricting plan.

Charles Feaga, objecting to the expense, suggests local attorney (and state chair for the Clinton campaign) James Kraft as a possible pro bono alternative: “Jim Kraft spoke out for good, clear government at the redistricting hearings. He might just want to take the case.” Shane Pendergrass notes that “It’s offensive to all but volunteer a county lawyer for free” without asking him, and pronounces herself “appalled” at the possible appearance of impropriety should Kraft do a favor for the council and then later appear before the council in its role as the zoning board. Kraft himself agrees: “There could be the perception that this was a quid pro quo.”

Thomas Lloyd, attorney for Maier and Pope, also thinks the council made a mistake hiring Civiletti, contending in a Circuit Court motion that the council as a body doesn’t have the right to sue or be sued. He notes, “If, personally, council members want to intervene, they’re welcome. But they should pay their own fees.” Meanwhile Charles Ecker continues to refuse to mount a defense, leaving C. Vernon Gray to flag Ecker’s action as a possible violation of the county charter and to note that “If he’s not going to be defending suits, it may be a good idea to cut the budget since the county won’t be needing as much money.”

Judge Cornelius Sybert, Jr., considers whether or not the council can be a party to the lawsuit, which as originally filed named only the county and the Board of Elections. Thomas Lloyd contends that the council cannot be sued since it is not a person, and that any past lawsuits in which the council was seemingly a defendant (such as one filed by county executive J. Hugh Nichols in 1978) were really lawsuits against council members as individuals. Civiletti associate Roger Titus, representing the council (or, as Lloyd would presumably put it, the Democratic members of the council), argues that the suit challenges the council’s competency to act, and that it is in the public interest for the council to be a party to the suit. He also threatens to appeal an unfavorable decision, aknowledging that any such appeal could delay redistricting “at least a year” and “really gum up the works.” In the end the council gets its wish (as the Baltimore Sun puts it) as Sybert allows it to join the suit as a defendant. The trial is scheduled to begin August 31.

(“Board to defend suit,” March 4, 1992, March 4, 1992, 5H; James M. Coram, “Council hires Civiletti for defense in redistricting suit,” Baltimore Sun, March 15, 1992, 2H; “Attorney objects to council’s hiring of lawyer,” Baltimore Sun, May 10, 1992, 5H; James M. Coram, “Judge weighing whether council can be party to suit,” Baltimore Sun, June 7, 1992, 15H; James M. Coram, “Redistricting suit names County Council as defendant,” Baltimore Sun, June 28, 1992, 6H)

Will Maier and Pope prevail? Or will the council (or rather the Democratic members thereof) again get their wish? Find out in the next episode, hopefully to appear soon so as not to prolong the suspense. In the meantime I ask readers to please refrain from posting spoilers.

November 1991. The County Council considers some last minute changes and then prepares for a vote on the proposed redistricting plans. In a marathon meeting the council initially approves a Democratic-sponsored redistricting bill by a 3–2 party-line vote, then moves to reconsider the vote for the plan at the suggestion of C. Vernon Gray, and then after midnight approves the same bill by a 3–2 margin again, as Democratic council members fail to secure at least one Republican vote to make it 4–1 and stave off a possible veto by county executive Charles Ecker. Republican council members complain that the plan is designed to cement Columbia’s dominance of Howard County politics: “[The plan] was written to ensure that three Democrats from Columbia would stay on the council for the next 10 years,” says Darrel Drown.¹

C. Vernon Gray responds that Republicans “never indicated an intention to negotiate”,and points out that in moving to reconsider the bill he had given Charles Feaga the opportunity to make an amendment removing from District 5 the Highland precinct of one of Feaga’s political rivals: “If we’d put John Taylor in the 4th District, this whole problem would have been solved.” Feaga, who had previously proposed just such an amendment but withdrew it prior to the first vote, notes that he wanted to retain 100% of his current district and complains about it being made even larger than it already was. Gray professes to be “really disappointed” with Feaga and Drown and accuses them of acting in bad faith: “They came in with their own game plan and executed it. They turned this into a circus.” Feaga responds, “[I] didn’t need to be scolded by a 15-minute sermon by Dr. Gray. . . . I thought he had a little more class than that,” and takes his case to the readers of the Baltimore Sun.

Unlike former county executive J. Hugh Nichols, who declined to sign the first redistricting bill on the grounds that it was a council responsibility, Charles Ecker promises to take a more active role: “I will either sign the bill or veto it. I won’t just let it sit there.” Although Shane Pendergrass anticipates that Ecker is “thinking about peace-making and what’s good for the county” and will sign the bill, Ecker decides to veto the bill, complaining in a letter to C. Vernon Gray that it unnecessarily divides communities, has population differences between districts that are too great, and makes District 5 excessively large: “[The plan] may well be a legally supportable document, but it is not a fair document.” Gray objects to this characterization (“I am dumbfounded for the executive to say it’s legal, but not fair”) and calls the veto “nothing more than a crass, selfish act for partisan political reasons.”

(James M. Coram, “Council to adopt district boundaries previewed in hearing,” Baltimore Sun, November 3, 1991, 9H; Michael J. Clark, “Howard approves new council lines,” Baltimore Sun, November 5, 1991, 3D; James M. Coram, “Democrats final winners of fiery redistricting war,” Baltimore Sun, November 6, 1991, 2H; “Ecker Promises To Take Action On Redistricting Bill,” Baltimore Sun, November 10, 1991, 2H; Charles Feaga, “Defending redistricting,” Baltimore Sun, November 27, 1991, 8H; James M. Coram, “Ecker vetoes council’s redistricting plan,” Baltimore Sun, November 17, 1991, 4H.)

December 1991. Unable to muster a 4–1 majority to overturn Charles Ecker’s veto of the council redistricting bill, the Democratic council members try the alternative approach and approve the redistricting plan as a resolution. Howard County GOP chair Carol Arscott objects to the strategy (“Since a resolution can not be vetoed or taken to referendum, it leaves too much power in the hands of three people”) and local Republicans contemplate a legal challenge to “set the record straight,” as Charles Feaga puts it, though Feaga is “hopeful that a compromise can be reached.”

Meanwhile the Howard County Board of Elections votes 2–1 along party lines to implement the plan previously approved by the council. As Board of Elections president (and Democrat) Frank Lupashunski explains, given the ambiguity in the county charter as to how redistricting plans were to be approved, “We accepted the resolution because we are an appointed board and it is our duty not to question any official body, which in this case was the council.”

“Howard Co. GOP may challenge map resolution,” Baltimore Sun, December 4, 1991, 2B; “Board of Elections OK’s controversial Howard council map,” Baltimore Sun, December 17, 1991, 6B.)

Thus ends the tumultuous year of 1991 (well, tumultuous as far as council redistricting was concerned). In part 15 we’ll find out whether the council and the county executive end up in court or not.

As noted in part 12, 1990 saw the Howard County political scene shaken up by the election of Republican Charles Ecker as County Executive, accompanied by Republican Darrel Drown being elected to County Council to join Charles Feaga and cut the Democratic majority from 4–1 to 3–2. Since 1990 was also a census year, this led to one of the most interesting episodes in council redistricting history:¹

March 1991. County executive Charles Ecker proposes appointing a committee to study the council redistricting issue. Council chair C. Vernon Gray expresses surprise at Ecker’s “bold move or perhaps naivete” in getting involved in what he considers solely a County Council function. Ecker disclaims any partisan motive in proposing the committee, a majority of which he would select (“I don’t check people’s registration [when making appointments]”), and says he’s just trying to “help and speed it along.”

(Michael J. Clark, “Ecker offers to help with redistricting, but council says no,” Baltimore Sun, March 16, 1991, 14B.)

May 1991. Charles Ecker proposes his own alternative redistricting plan to the County Council. The major proposed change is to Shane Pendergrass’s district (District 1 in southeastern Howard), which would lose several Democratic-leaning precincts in Columbia and pick up two precincts north of Route 175 that previously voted for Republican council member Darrel Drown. Pendergrass protests against what she considers a “Columbia-ectomy.” C. Vernon Gray comments, “We allowed [Ecker] to have some input and he has given it to us.” Charles Feaga concedes the plan is “just a beginning.”

(James M. Coram, “Ecker Plan Could Give GOP Edge,” Baltimore Sun, May 26, 1991, 1H.)

July 1991. The County Council begins work on redistricting with a focus on Shane Pendergrass’s district, which needs to be reduced in size due to relatively strong population growth. Republicans propose a plan that expands District 5 (western Howard) to touch all surrounding counties, and make changes to District 3 (east Columbia) justified based on preserving minority rights. “If Howard County’s map is taken to court for any reason, this is the map the court will draw” comments Carol Arscott, head of the Howard County Republican Central Committee, and notes that creating a minority district as part of the plan was “of primary importance.” C. Vernon Gray responds “I’m a little surprised that the No. 1 priority for Republicans is blacks, Asians and Hispanics.”

This is the second Republican-created plan (the first being the Ecker plan); Shane Pendergrass refers to the two plans as “outrageous” and “ridiculous.” The hearing is sparsely attended (by 22 people, including council staff); seven people testify including Glenelg High School sophomore Brian Meshkin, who shows up to present his own independently-created plan and receives praise from council members.

(“Battle Over County Redistricting To Focus On 1st District,” Baltimore Sun, July 10, 1991, 2H; James M. Coram, “Battle Lines Drawn,” Baltimore Sun, July 14, 1991, 1H.)

August 1991. By a 3–2 party line vote the Howard County Council gives preliminary approval to hiring former US Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti (at a discounted rate of $150 per hour and total fee cap of $25,000) to provide legal advice on County Council redistricting. Democratic council members also present a plan of their own; according to Lloyd Knowles, chair of the subcommittee that created the plan, its goal is to “provide a reasonable basis for Democratic districts” and “not . . . allow the Republicans to turn the county over to developers.”

Council Republicans characterize the Democratic plan as a “bad joke” (Charles Feaga) and a “blatantly partisan scheme” (Darrel Drown) and decry the move to hire Civiletti: “We could have sat down and reasoned rationally without spending 25K, but that is not something [the Democrats] are willing to do,” says Drown. Meanwhile former GOP House of Delegates candidate Arthur Reynolds criticizes his party’s proposal and accuses his fellow Republicans of acting like Democrats in supporting a “racial spoils system” and exhibiting “shameless opportunism” in “using the [Voting Rights Act] as a transparent vehicle to engage in GOP-inspired gerrymandering.”

(Michael J. Clark, “Howard council moves toward hiring Civiletti,” Baltimore Sun, August 25, 1991, 3C; James M. Coram, “GOP scoffs at Democrats’ “outrageous” redistricting plan,” Baltimore Sun, September 1, 1991, 4H; Arthur Reynolds, “Redistricting follies,” Baltimore Sun, August 25, 1991, 14H.)

September 1991. C. Vernon Gray unveils a Democratic redistricting proposal and wins support from other Democratic council members. Darrel Drown urges Charles Ecker to “veto it and throw it into the trash can,” as Ecker disagrees with Democratic council members and their lawyer Benjamin Civiletti over whether he in fact has veto power over the plan. (“I have veto power, and if I don’t like it, I will veto it,” Ecker vows.) Meanwhile Charles Feaga speculates that Shane Pendergrass cut a deal with the other two Democratic council members: “All three are considering a run for county executive, and you wonder if Shane agreed to step aside in order to get the district she wanted.”

The Demoratic plan also renumbers the districts, with the proposed new districts as follows:²

• District 1. Ellicott City and Elkridge.
• District 2. East Columbia, including the villages of Oakland Mills and Long Reach as well as nearby areas.
• District 3. The rest of Columbia east of US 29, including the villages of Owen Brown and King’s Contrivance, as well as Savage and North Laurel.
• District 4. West Columbia and nearby areas.
• District 5. Western Howard.

(Michael J. Clark, “Democrats back Howard council redistricting,” Baltimore Sun, September 24, 1991, 3B; James M. Coram, “Feaga Says Redistricting Is Tailor-made For Democrats,” Baltimore Sun, September 25, 1991, 2H; Michael J. Clark, “Howard executive, councilman squabble over districts plan,” Baltimore Sun, September 27, 1991, 14E.)

In part 14 of the series the Democratic members of the County Council are challenged by the new political composition of county government, and scramble to find a solution.

October 1990. Now that the primaries are over the candidates position themselves for the general election. Republican Charles Ecker faces an uphill fight in his campaign for county executive, at least on the money front: Reports out in late September for fundraising through August 31 show him trailing Democratic incumbent Elizabeth Bobo in terms of attracting major donors (contributing $200 or more), raising under $6K from thirteen major donors versus Bobo’s total of over $60K from 184 major donors. Undaunted, Ecker channels Ronald Reagan as he asks Howard County voters “Are you better off now than you were four years ago” and accuses Bobo of “killing Route 100.” Bobo in turns accuses Ecker of hypocrisy on the matter of county spending: “He asked me to spend the money [when Ecker was deputy superintendent of schools]. . . . Has he changed his mind?”

In the county council race in District 1 (Elkridge, Savage, North Laurel, and southeast Columbia), Republican challenger candidate Dennis Schrader accuses the county government of being “socialistic” and “tinkering in the marketplace” when it comes to planning for county growth, and notes that incumbent Shane Pendergrass’s support for a growth cap means “There’s going to be a lot of kids [who] don’t have toys at Christmas.”

In District 2 (Ellicott City), Democratic incumbent Angela Beltram finds voters know what they care about (whether or not Old Frederick Road and Route 108 get connected via Gray Rock Drive) and less about who’s running for council: a voter asks “Who’s that running against you,” a voter asks, and Beltram responds jokingly, “I’m not going to tell you.” Challenger Darrel Drown hopes to fix that problem by pounding the pavement with campaign literature to hand out and a voice recorder with which to record voters’ names, addresses, party affiliations, and concerns, despite the danger of being mistaken for a “Jehovah’s Witness or a door-to-door salesperson.”

In a battle between newly-minted politicians in District 4 (west Columbia), recently-appointed council member Paul Farragut and his Republican challenger, recently-elected CA board member Michael Deets, spar over how closely Farragut is tied to Elizabeth Bobo (“I wasn’t [Bobo’s] first choice [for county council],” points out Farragut) and find that even though planning decisions have already been made for Columbia, voters in their district are still concerned about growth elsewhere in the county: “They have to fight people coming down [Routes] 29 and 32,” Deets notes.

(“Big money favors Bobo,” Columbia Flier, September 27, 1990, p. 31; “Ecker, Bobo trade a few jabs,” Columbia Flier, October 4, 1990, p. 34; “Growth is focus of race,” Columbia Flier, October 18, 1990, p. 30; “With nothing for granted, Beltram keeps on running,” Columbia Flier, October 18, 1990, p. 32; “Drown looks past 1986 defeat,” Columbia Flier, October 18, 1990, p. 33; “Growth divides contenders,” Columbia Flier, October 25, 1990, p. 35.)

November 1990. As the county executive campaign enters its final days, Elizabeth Bobo maintains her lead in fundraising over Charles Ecker (raising almost $150,000 by October 21 compared to less than $67,000 for Ecker). However Bobo’s money proves for naught as Ecker rides a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment (says one voter, “I have a strong desire to vote anyone in office, out of office, except for [governor William Donald Schaefer]”) to a narrow victory over Bobo to become Howard County Executive. Darrel Drown rides the same wave to a convincing 58%–42% win over Angela Beltram, and Shane Pendergrass barely escapes an upset by Dennis Schrader. “This is beyond my wildest dreams,” exults county Republican chair Carol Arscott, as Republicans also triumph in races for two House of Delegate seats, a state senate seat, and the Clerk of the Circuit Court position.¹

Democrats win a 3–2 majority on the Howard County Council, as C. Vernon Gray runs unopposed, Paul Farragut wins by a comfortable margin, and Shane Pendergrass barely defeats Dennis Schrader. On the Republican side incumbent council member Charles Feaga wins easily and Darrel Drown defeats Democratic incumbent Angela Beltram.²

The election highlights the continued divisions between Columbia and the rest of Howard County: Bobo won in Columbia precincts by an overall 58%–42% margin, but lost in the rest of the county by margins of 20% or more, with Ecker winning 2–1 in western Howard. Part of the Republican strategy was to minimize the potential impact of Columbia’s voters by not running anyone against C. Vernon Gray: “Why turn those voters loose in his district?” comments Charles Feaga, who goes on to note “I’ve gotten along very, very well with Vernon.”³

(“Democratic incumbents fall to Ecker, Drown, and McCabe,” Columbia Flier, November 8, 1990, p. 26; “The county’s divided loyalties,” Columbia Flier, November 8, 1990, p. 28; “GOP reaps victory,” Columbia Flier, November 15, 1990, p. 32.)

December 1990. As the Democratic county council majority gets cut from 4–1 to 3–2, speculation is rampant about how the changed composition of the council will affect its relationship with the county executive and its position on growth-related issues, with both proponents and opponents of growth seeing cause for optimism. Given C. Vernon Gray’s frequent clashes with Elizabeth Bobo and his often siding with Charles Feaga on issues, Angela Beltram makes a prediction: “I think [the next council chair] is going to be Vernon.” That prediction is borne out as the council unanimously elects Gray as chair, in a vote preceded by consultation among the remaining Democrats on the council, who then informed Charles Feaga and Darrel Drown of their choice.

(“Gray seen anchoring council,” Columbia Flier, November 22, 1990; “Gray elected to chair county council,” Columbia Flier, December 6, 1990, p. 25.)

In part 13 of this series we’ll see how the new political landscape translated into controversy and contention between the county council and the county executive over the next round of council redistricting.

HoCoRising - 2011-08-17 01:11

Nicely done. Great post.

Michael Davis (mdavis@darslaw.com) - 2011-08-17 10:43

The most polarizing issue during the 1990 campaign was Bobo’s inability to understand growth issues. She was a reasonably popular County Executive through 1988, but starting in 1989, with her poorly conceived growth moratorium, the possibility of 20-acre zoning in the West, and an “inadequate” public facilities ordinace, among other things, she managed to unite the development and residents’ communities in opposition to her land use policies. Add to these failures her heavy-handed fundraising techniques and “circle the wagons” mentality, she created a true recipe for failure in her reelection efforts. Yet, with all of these failures, and more, the election did go down to the last minutes of the campaign. Chuck Ecker and his campaign worked very hard up until the very end, but had little hope until the last week or two. Then, everything turned. It was marvelous to behold! By the way, during the campaign, the Bobo Administration conceded that there was a $3 million shortfall in the budget and certain costs were frozen. It was amazing walking in just a couple of days after the election and learning that shortfall was really $20 million! Howard County was very lucky to have Chuck Ecker as County Executive to deal with that shortfall and the coming recession. Very lucky indeed.

hecker - 2011-08-17 16:09

Thanks for stopping by to leave a comment! It’s clear from reading the old stories that there was a lot of discontent with Liz Bobo as county executive, and based on my relatively superficial reading it appears that the council candidates who did less well (Angie Beltram and Shane Pendergrass) were the ones who seemed to be perceived as more tied to Bobo than those like Vernon Gray who had an easier time of it. (You or other more familiar with the politics of that era should please feel free to correct me.) I’ll echo your assessment of the effectiveness of Ecker’s campaign. (In the last post I expressed my admiration of his campaign ads.) As I implied in footnote 3 of this post it seems that Howard County Republicans of that era were thinking strategically in terms of what it took to overcome their disadvantage in registration, run an effective all-county effort, and field candidates that could appeal beyond the party base.

If you recall, at the conclusion of part 10 Howard County had just completed its first set of council elections based on the new district lines, with the election producing a 4–1 Democratic majority on the council along with a Democratic count executive. (The electoral results were very similar to those of the 2010 elections—almost scarily so, in fact.) We now jump forward to 1990 and the second set of county elections held under the district boundaries adopted in 1986. Because 1990 was a census year, the 1990 elections were also the last set of elections under those district boundaries, with boundaries to be redrawn after the election (and hence the importance of that election, as we shall see).¹

January–May 1990. 1990 starts out with that perennial Howard County topic of discussion, county development, as county executive Elizabeth Bobo unveils a proposed General Plan touted as having “something for everyone.” GOP county executive candidate Charles Ecker attacks the proposed plan, including its proposal for a central-county greenbelt, claiming that the plan “preserves farmland at the expense of farming”. Meanwhile Bobo angers some of her fellow Democrats, most notably those planning to challenge for state senate seats, by forming a political slate with incumbent senators Edward Kasemeyer and Thomas Yeager. Republican Central Committee chair Carol Arscott sees it as an attempt to “circle the wagons” and claims “It’s kind of a backhanded compliment to the Republican Party. They’re taking us seriously.” Bobo holds a meeting with county Democratic office-holders and Central Committee members to discuss her actions, but delegate (and prospective senate candidate) Virginia Thomas notes “I don’t think it helped much in terms of cooling people down.” Meanwhile Howard County Republicans get dragged into a dispute over allegedly deceptive fundraising by the previous state party chair.

(“Bobo promises something for everyone,” January 4, 1990, p. 22; “Ecker lambastes proposed General Plan,” January 18, 1990, p. 33; “Bobo slate provokes anger,” January 18, 1990, p. 33; “Democrats meet with Bobo,” January 25, 1990, p. 33; “GOP factions feud over funds,” January 25, 1990, p. 36.)

More candidates in the upcoming elections emerge. Democrat Thomas Hartman plans to run for county executive against Elizabeth Bobo on a pro-growth platform, even while a group of developers pledge support for Bobo despite their disagreement with the growth cap she promoted. However Hartman acknowledges he has an uphill battle in the face of a June 1989 poll showing that only 10% of voters would vote to replace Bobo. On the GOP side Dennis Schrader announces his intent to run against Democratic incumbent Shane Pendergrass in council district 1 (Elkridge, Savage, North Laurel, and southeast Columbia), as Pendergrass also faces a primary challenge from slow-growth activist William Smith. Republican Darrel Drown tries a rematch against Democratic incumbent Angela Beltram in council district 2 (Ellicott City), and activist John Taylor (of Howard Countians for Responsible Growth) announces a primary challenge against fellow Republican Charles Feaga, incumbent council member for District 5 (western Howard), whom Taylor accuses of being too pro-development.

Republican Gilbert South, who lost to Elizabeth Bobo in 1986, plans another try for the county executive post, running first against Charles Ecker. (“So much for the conventional wisdom that only Democrats can have a primary,” notes GOP county chair Carol Arscott.) South and Ecker ignore each other and team up against Bobo (a “spend-it-now county executive” according to Ecker, and “a willing pawn in the developers’ game of power” according to South). Meanwhile Bobo’s Democratic primary Thomas Hartman promotes incorporating Columbia as a city and changing the county’s tax system to focus on the value of land, not buildings. (“I don’t understand what he is talking about,” says Bobo regarding the latter proposal.)²

(“Opponent of growth cap plans to run against Bobo,” February 1, 1990, p. 24; “Developers urge Bobo’s re-election,” February 1, 1990, p. 24; “Columbian starts run for council,” February 8, 1990, p. 32; “Activist opposes Shane,” May 24, 1990, p. 26; “Republicans enter 2 races,” February 15, 1990, p. 31; “Activist files for council,” March 29, 1990; “South will run again for exec,” April 26, 1990, p. 27; “Rivals blast Bobo on finances,” May 24, 1990, p. 26; “Exec candidate advocates incorporation of Columbia,” May 17, 1990, p. 31.)

May–July 1990. As the filing deadline approaches incumbent county office-holders begin to declare their intentions. Council District 5 council member Charles Feaga announces his plan to run for re-election (“growth should not be a dirty word,” he notes, in response to his primary challenger John Taylor), Shane Pendergrass and Angela Beltram do likewise in District 1 and District 2 respectively, Paul Farragut (previously appointed to the council to succeed the retiring Ruth Keeton) will face his first real electoral test in District 4 (west Columbia), and Virgina governor Doug Wilder helicopters in to announce his support of C. Vernon Gray’s re-election in District 3 (east Columbia). (Explaining why he’s there even though Gray will apparently face no opposition in either the primary or the general election, Wilder cites Gray as following the maxim “prepare for war in times of peace.”)

Rounding out the primary lists for County Council are Republican Darrel Drown, looking forward to a rematch with Beltram, Democrat Susan Scheidt, recruited by Elizabeth Bobo to face Feaga. and Republican Michael Deets, who signs on to run against Paul Farragut. As predicted, no candidates surface in opposition to C. Vernon Gray. (“It gives me pain as a Republican to say this, but . . . we decided, in good conscience, that we couldn’t ask anyone to run,” states Central Committee chair Carol Arscott.) In the county executive race Thomas Hartman abandons his primary challenge to Bobo at the last minute.

(“2 incumbents announce,” June 7, 1990, p. 22; “3 announce re-election bid,” June 14, 1990, p. 28; “Beltram going for 2nd term,” June 28, 1990, p. 33; “GOP recruits 3 to face incumbents,” July 19, 1990, p. 21; “Candidates who have filed for county election,” July 26, 1990, p. 26.)

August–September 1990. The primary campaigns heat up, as “horse race” coverage focuses on candidate fund-raising. The first round of reports show Charles Feaga as the leader with over $42,000 raised (besting past council fund-raising champion C. Vernon Gray), while Michael Deets fulfills his pledge to run a “low-cost, low-key” campaign by reporting only $310 in his campaign fund ($300 of which is his own money). In the county executive race Elizabeth Bobo raises more than both her Republican challengers combined, with Charles Ecker having spent “practically all” of his funds on various expenses, including running full-page ads in local newspapers in which his supporters criticize the Bobo administration (“Frankly, I’m tired of trying to talk through a closed door,” complains Bev Wilhide) and challenge voters: “I’m voting for Chuck Ecker. Shouldn’t you?”³

(“Feaga is council’s top fund raiser—gifts total $42.5K,” August 16, 1990, p. 24; Charles Ecker campaign advertisement, August 2, 1990, p. 19)

William Smith and John Taylor, who make a point of not accepting contributions from developers, attack their opponents on growth-related issues, with Smith claiming that Shane Pendergrass didn’t support adequate public facilities to accommodate county growth, and Taylor accusing Charles Feaga of “taking too much much money from developer interests.” (Feaga counters that Taylor is a newcomer not familiar with Feaga’s past accomplishments: “[He’s] recently moved in and maybe only been here just two years as a registered voter.”) Republican county executive candidates Charles Ecker and Gilbert South also contend to convince voters each has the best alternative approach to managing county growth. (South jabs, “I just hear Chuck saying ‘These are the problems’. . . . That we need comprehensive planning. . . . But I’m not sure why Chuck doesn’t come out and say what these plans consist of.”)

(“Council rivals differ on growth,” August 23, 1990, p. 28; “Feaga, Taylor exchange jabs over land use,” September 6, 1990, p. 28; “Ecker, South vie to face Bobo,” August 30, p. 28.)

In a primary election marked by light turnout, Ecker defeats South by an over 2–1 margin to earn the right to face Elizabeth Bobo in the general election. South offers his support (“[I’ll] do whatever I can to help Chuck”) but remains hopeful about his own political future (“I’ll be running again in four years!”). Shane Pendergrass and Charles Feaga turn back the challenges from slow-growth activists William Smith and John Taylor, although Feaga’s margin is relatively small. (“It’s scares me it’s so close” says Feaga’s campaign manager, Gail Bates, before Feaga finally crosses the line.)⁴

All other incumbents are either unopposed or survive their primary challenges, with the exception of Sheriff Herbert Stonesifer, who goes down to defeat in the wake of a controversy over two of his deputies mimicking Nazis while on duty. As Robert Kittleman prepares to run for re-election to the house of delegates, his son Allan surprises everyone by receiving more votes than Charles Ecker, winning a seat on the Republican Central Committee and sparking lively speculation about his political future.⁵

(“Victors,” September 13, 1990, p. 28; “Dems stress unity,” September 13, 1990, p. 30; “New stars emerge in parties,” September 27, 1990, p. 28.)

This has been a long post (absence has not made me less prolix), so I’ll conclude my discussion of the 1990 elections in part 12.

In a fire-proof vault somewhere in the capital Grover Norquist stores the signed originals of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge in which politicians “solemnly bind themselves to oppose any and all tax increases.” Reading about this put me in mind of the classic Stephen Vincent Benét short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in which Jabez Stone, a New Hampshire farmer beset with troubles, signs his soul away to the devil (or “Scratch,” as he calls himself in the story).

Immediately Stone’s fortunes turn, and he begins a career in politics: “[They] asked him to stand for selectman, and he stood for it; there began to be talk of running him for state senate.” However as time goes on Stone regrets signing the contract, and pleads with Scratch to be freed from it. He wins a few years reprieve, but he knows eventually he’ll have to face up to the downside of his bargain: “By the last months of those years, Jabez Stone’s known all over the state and there’s talk of running him for governor—and it’s dust and ashes in his mouth.”

In despair Stone seeks the help of Daniel Webster. Renowned as a great lawyer, Webster was also one of the most important politicians of the first half of the 19th century, serving many years in the House and Senate (representing New Hampshire and then Massachusetts), and also as Secretary of State to three presidents. Webster was an tireless advocate for the manufacturing states of New England and an even more fervent proponent of the American Union—a major theme in the story:

They say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, “Dan’l Webster—Dan’l Webster!” the ground’ll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake. And after a while you’ll hear a deep voice saying, “Neighbor, how stands the Union?” Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock-bottomed and copper sheathed, one and indivisible, or he’s liable to rear right out of the ground.

With Henry Clay and others Webster founded the Whig Party in opposition to the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. Though he spoke against the efforts of John Calhoun and others in the South who promoted the expansion of slavery to the west, shortly before his death in 1852 he supported the Compromise of 1850 that won a few final years of peace. Conflicts over slavery eventually split the Whig Party, and Abraham Lincoln’s newly-formed Republican Party inherited the Whig Party’s Northern voters and its policies of government support for a “more modern, market-oriented economy” and “a vigorous program of government funded ‘internal improvements’” (including transportation infrastructure and public schools).

In the story Scratch seeks Daniel Webster’s soul to add to his collection (“‘He’d certainly be a prize. I wish we could see our way clear to him.’”) and proves a formidable opponent to Webster’s effort to free Jabez Stone:

There wasn’t any doubt as to the deed or the signature—that was the worst of it. Dan’l Webster twisted and turned and thumped his fist on the table, but he couldn’t get away from that. He offered to compromise the case; the stranger wouldn’t hear of it. . . . He was a great lawyer, Dan’l Webster, but we know who’s the King of Lawyers, as the Good Book tells us, and it seemed as if, for the first time, Dan’l Webster had met his match.

Webster calls for a trial before “an American judge and an American jury” but is taken aback as Scratch summons forth from the dead a collection of the country’s worst villains. (Though not all: “‘I miss General Arnold from the company.‘ ‘Benedict Arnold is engaged upon other business,’ said the stranger, with a glower.”) Angry at the forces arrayed against him, Webster is “all ready to bust out with lightnings and denunciations” but realizes the trap laid for him: “if he fought them with their own weapons, he’d fall into their power.” Instead he appeals to his fellow Americans’ better natures and revives their sense of patriotism: “He was talking about the things that make a country a country, and a man a man.”

In the end Scratch is foiled, as the judge and jury find for the defendant and the devil’s contract is voided: “‘I’ll have that paper first, if you please,’ said Dan’l Webster, and he took it and tore it into four pieces. It was queerly warm to the touch.” Webster then turns on Scratch himself (“His hand came down like a bear trap on the stranger’s arm. For he knew that once you bested anybody like Mr. Scratch in fair fight, his power on you was gone.”) and extracts a promise “‘never to bother Jabez Stone nor his heirs or assigns nor any other New Hampshire man till doomsday’.”

Before sending Scratch on his way Webster learns of his own fate: He will never be president, and some will repudiate him for the stands he takes. But “it does not matter what men say,” Webster avers, and asks a final question:

“I have fought for the Union all my life. Will I see that fight won against those who would tear it apart?”

“Not while you live,” said the stranger, grimly, “but it will be won. And after you are dead, there are thousands who will fight for your cause, because of words that you spoke.”

“Why, then, you long-barreled, slab-sided, lantern-jawed, fortune-telling note shaver!” said Dan’l Webster, with a great roar of laughter, “be off with you to your own place before I put my mark on you! For, by the thirteen original colonies, I’d go to the Pit itself to save the Union!”

And with that he drew back his foot for a kick that would have stunned a horse. It was only the tip of his shoe that caught the stranger, but he went flying out of the door.

In Grover Norquist’s fire-proof vault lies the signature of a present-day Daniel Webster. If he came back from the dead, would the original Daniel Webster’s signature be there as well?

My responses put me in the “Post-Moderns” group, though I should note that I didn’t fit the profile exactly in terms of my answers to the quiz, and also that some of the questions don’t allow for nuance or “none of the above” answers. For example, in national security matters I’m a follower of Thomas P. M. Barnett, and thus consider non-military approaches to security, including extending economic globalization, equally as important as military efforts. However the response “Good diplomacy is the best way to ensure peace” doesn’t really capture that very well, so I answered the opposite, “The best way to ensure peace is through military strength.”

Out of curiosity I went looking for other takes on the report. Here are some of the ones I found most interesting in an initial search via Google news:

• “The American Political Landscape: More Interesting Than You Thought,” by Michael Scherer. A good brief summary of the report for those who don’t want to read the whole thing. His takeaway: “While the country is historically polarized, the edges do not command all that many of the votes. Elections are still decided by groups that are motivated less by ideology than by identity, whether it be socioeconomic or cultural.”
• “Study Captures Electorate Beyond “Red vs. Blue”,” by David Paul Kuhn. Another good overview, with a particular emphasis on the Republican-leaning clusters: “The right’s center of gravity has centralized. Conservatives are pulled rightward less because of any one sphere of conservatism than because of conservatism itself. This convergence is likely, if not largely, owed to a Democratic president pushing Democratic policies. . . . Antagonists have always rallied political coalitions.”
• “The misunderstood independent,” by Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza. Points out that it is a mistake to think of “independents” or “moderates” as monolithic groups (or for that matter as the same group): “Pew identifies three different kinds of independents. . . . A look at their views on issues shows those three groups can often be among the most extreme on a given topic. . . . While the middle of the road is often the best track to getting independent votes, the data suggests that may appeal to one set of independents but irritate another.”
• “Pew Report And Osama Bin Laden: Why The Presidential Approval Rating Bump Won’t Last,” by Mark Blumenthal. Leaving aside the topical discussion of Obama’s approval ratings, the underlying point of this article is that partisan divides are now oriented around attitudes about government rather than attitudes about national security: “What now divides the party groups more clearly are attitudes about the efficiency and worthiness of government and the social safety network. These are also the issues now most likely to create cross-pressure on true swing voters.”
• “What drives swing voters?.” Compares voting behavior of the Disaffected and Post-Moderns, and concludes that “Social issues turn out to play a huge role in driving the voting behavior, and economic issues very little role.”
• “Pew report offers clues to lasting impact of recent GOP wins,” by Jon Cohen. Highlights the continued allegiance of libertarians to the Republican party, despite major differences on social issues. (Note that this runs contrary to Chait’s thesis.)
• “Poll shows a nation deeply divided and more doctrinaire,” by Dan Balz. Highlights ongoing political polarization: “Staunch Conservatives and Solid Liberals . . . are more ideologically consistent internally while sharing almost nothing in common with each other on major political issues. . . . Many in the “middle” hold strong, ideological views.”

If I have time I’ll try to track down more analyses and post links to them. In the meantime have fun taking the quiz yourself! (Or, alternatively, have fun guessing how my fellow Howard County bloggers will end up on the typology map. I have a sneaking suspicion I’m not the only Post-Modern out there.)

UPDATE: Corrected the missing link on the Mark Blumenthal article.

Before heading home after a recent family visit to attend the Philadelphia Flower Show, we stopped to see the Liberty Bell. One of the most interesting aspects of the bell’s history (which I hadn’t fully appreciated before my visit) is that for almost the first hundred years of its life (it was cast in 1753) it didn’t really serve as a symbol of liberty or freedom, despite the quote from Leviticus 25:10 (“Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof”) inscribed on the bell. It was simply the bell that hung in the Pennsylvania State House and was rung on special occasions, including possibly on July 8, 1776, to mark the reading of the Declaration of Independence.

The State House bell was actually named the “Liberty Bell” in the 1830s by abolitionists, who called on the nation to fulfill the promise of the bell’s inscription to those millions of “inhabitants thereof” who were enslaved. The idea of the bell as a symbol of liberty took fire during the decades before and after the Civil War (helped along by some 19th-century patriotic myth-making), and it’s been subsequently adopted in turn by multiple groups and causes, from the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s (which featured a replica “Woman’s Liberty Bell”) to a US Savings Bond campaign in the 1950s that portrayed the bell as a symbol of freedom in opposition to communism.

That campaign featured the distribution of replica bells to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and various US territories, and many other replicas have been placed around the country and around the world. Maryland’s version of the bell is unfortunately hidden away on the campus of St. John’s College, but others serve as public rallying points. For example, the Liberty Bell replica in Bakersfield, California (erected as part of the 1976 bicentennial) has served as a venue for a diverse set of events and causes: a Tea Party Patriots Tax Day Rally, the 31st annual Pride Rally by the Bakersfield gay community, a local National Day of Prayer rally, protests against education funding cuts, a celebration of medical marijuana legislation, and local events by civil rights activists and labor unions.

Despite the diversity, all of these events have at their heart support and celebration of some aspect of liberty and freedom. As I’ve noted previously, I’ve been recently reading and commenting on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog. Jason Brennan, one of the founders of the blog, is the co-author (with David Schmidtz) of A Brief History of Liberty, which discusses the varying concepts of liberty that have arisen over the years, including political liberty and the rule of law, religious freedom, free markets, civil rights, and personal independence and psychological freedom.

Although it’s marketed as part of a history of philosophy series, A Brief History of Liberty is a really excellent introduction for general readers and can be profitably consulted by anyone no matter where they sit on the political spectrum (or on the Nolan Chart, if you’re into that). Conservatives and libertarians should read it for a good discussion of liberty as capability, i.e., the point that absence of restraint on personal action can and in many people’s minds should be complemented by measures to ensure that every person is able to profitably take advantage of that freedom. This includes ensuring that every person receives an adequate education, is protected against catastrophic and economically ruinous health problems, and is otherwise equipped to be a productive member of society. In a Howard County context the school system, the public library system (which aims to provide “high-quality public education for all ages”), and initiatives like the Plan to End Homelessness [PDF] (spearheaded by the aptly named Board to Promote Self-Sufficiency) can all be seen as supporting this goal.

Liberals (in the modern sense) and progressives should in turn read A Brief History of Liberty for a robust defense of a free market economy and its ability to promote general prosperity and provide a quality of life even for the poorest families that is greatly improved over that experienced by most people outside the developed world. You don’t need to be a Randian to believe that doing business is a capitalistic society is a worthy endeavor, and you don’t have to be a Chamber of Commerce lobbyist to question whether government sometimes over-steps in regulating businesses.

To give but two examples, locally we’ve seen a long-running controversy about allowing direct shipping of wine to Maryland consumers (and more recently about siting wineries within Howard County), and I’ve blogged about Maryland restrictions on direct-to-consumer genetic testing. These may seem like relatively trivial issues of interest only to a few (and relatively privileged) Marylanders, but many business activities can be portrayed as trivial in the grand scheme of things and yet still help contribute to overall prosperity of our community. And in these particular examples what may seem on the surface like relatively benign paternalism (“We’re just trying to prevent minors from getting access to alcohol” or “We’re concerned about naïve people misinterpreting these tests”) masks special interests (liquor wholesalers or doctors) using government to help maintain their economic positions against perceived competitors.

I’ll close by looking elsewhere in the world to note that liberty isn’t necessarily as simple as it seems, no matter your political persuasion. For example, country A has a very favorable business climate, with a significantly lower corporate tax rate than the US, no government-mandated minimum wage, and a flexible regulatory framework hailed by a major US conservative think tank as “highly conducive to innovation and productivity growth.” Surely, a progressive might say, this country’s people are at the mercy of rapacious corporations bent on exploiting their workers. On the other hand, country B has one of the highest tax burdens in the world, with the government talking over half of GDP to fund an extensive set of social services. Surely, a conservative might say, this is an example of socialism run amok, with the inevitable consequence being a unproductive and inefficient economy in which no sane capitalist would dare to invest.

As it turns out, country A and country B are one and the same country, namely Denmark. In Will Wilkinson’s phrase, Denmark is essentially a “laissez faire welfare state” that combines a relatively light regulatory framework with generous social benefits in terms of health care, social security, education, and so on. As Wilkinson also notes, that means that Denmark scores very high on scorecards like the Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom index; in fact, in the latest such ranking for 2011 Denmark actually ranked higher than the United States, despite being penalized in the rankings due to its high tax burden and level of government spending.¹

One reason Denmark can get away with less regulation of businesses is that issues that in the US get regulated by government (like the minimum wage) are handled in Denmark via negotiation between employers (or associations of employers in particular industries) and employee associations (i.e., unions). (Over three quarters of Danish workers belong in such associations.) Universal health care not tied to employment also increases labor mobility, and a government-funded education system (tuition-free to students) produces a relatively well-educated work force.²

Now, is the experience of Denmark replicable in the United States? I doubt it, mainly because the heterogeneous nature of the United States (ethnically and otherwise) makes it difficult to impossible to sustain a nationwide consensus for a generous and universal social safety net. (See my discussion of Robert Putnam’s research.) However I think the example of Denmark does call into question a facile identification of liberty solely with low taxes and small government. Although the US prides itself (and rightly so) in being a traditional beacon of freedom to the world, the world may yet have a thing or two to teach the US about freedom.

I don’t want to rehash the arguments for or against this position; the relevant Wikipedia article has a good summary. I personally believe the proposition is not really provable one way or the other, as it ultimately depends on assumptions that are more in the nature of subjective judgments than testable propositions. What I’m interested in for purposes of this post is a different question, namely whether people act in a way that’s consistent with the proposition that taxation is theft.

For example, suppose a thief or one of his confederates gifts you with a valuable piece of property, property that you strongly suspect is stolen, as in the episode of the Sopranos where Paulie delivers a big-screen TV unasked to the home of Meadow’s soccer coach. If you’re like most people you’ll probably proceed as follows: First, you might refuse the gift. If that’s not possible (as in the Sopranos episode, where refusing to go along with Paulie would be a bad idea) then you might accept the gift and then either take it to the authorities or try to return it to its rightful owner. If neither of those is possible (Paulie would be mad if the coach went to the police, and the coach has no idea from whom the TV was stolen) then you might give the gift to charity, so that you yourself would not be a willing recipient of stolen goods kept for your own use, and thus morally complicit in the original theft.

Now let’s consider taxation, and assume that taxation is morally equivalent to theft. The typical person both pays taxes and also enjoys certain benefits which are paid for through taxes: pure public goods such as national defense and scientific research, other goods such as access to public roads, and in some cases goods provided directly to individuals, such as Social Security or Medicare benefits.

It’s quite conceivable that for many people the total value of those goods received over their lives is in excess, and sometimes in considerable excess, of the total taxes they paid over their lives. (For example, for many people the amount they receive in Social Security benefits exceeds the amount they would have received had they not paid Social Security taxes and instead invested the money themselves.)

If you are (or could be) one of these people, and if you believe that taxation is theft, what should you do? In effect you may well have received stolen property, or at least the equivalent of stolen property, since the excess benefits you received were possible only because other people were compelled to pay their taxes under threat of force. Should you attempt to make restitution in some way? Certainly you don’t know exactly from whom those taxes were extracted, but perhaps morality demands that you at least make a good faith estimate of what you have received illegitimately, and donate an equivalent amount to a deserving private charity.

Clearly most people don’t do this, but then most people aren’t libertarians. Do any libertarians attempt this exercise? This is not a rhetorical question; I’m genuinely interested in how a principled libertarian might approach this problem. I can think of some possible responses. For example, it may be that there is no practical way of determining whether you have received benefits from government over and above taxes paid, and thus you have no way of being certain whether you have in fact “received stolen property” in the sense discussed here.

But I’m just an amateur political philosopher, and no libertarian to boot, and I haven’t thought that deeply about the problem. I’m sure there are people out there who have, perhaps even among this blog’s readers, and I’m interested in seeing what sort of responses they might make.

Corey Andrews (cacoreya@yahoo.com) - 2011-04-01 16:41

If a thief stole something from you, but gave you something in return, it would still be theft.

Corey Andrews (cacoreya@yahoo.com) - 2011-04-01 16:44

I would also say that most people ARE libertarians, even if just moderately. Most people like freedom and don’t want the government in their lives. It tends to be people deeply involved in politics and political thought that aren’t libertarians.

hecker - 2011-04-01 17:41

Corey, thanks for stopping by. I agree with your comment, however I think you’re addressing a slightly different argument. You’re countering an argument that goes somewhat as follows: “Taxation can’t be theft, because you’re getting something in return for the taxes you pay, i.e., various government services and benefits.” I agree that if you consider taxation to be theft and hence immoral, then your counter-argument is effective: provision of government services can’t make up for the original immoral act. I was considering a slightly different question though, one that in your terms goes something like this: If a thief stole something from you, but gave you something in return (which we’ll assume to be of equal value to what was stolen), and the thief also gave you something they had stolen from someone else, what would be your moral obligation with respect to what you received that was stolen from another?

Corey Andrews (cacoreya@yahoo.com) - 2011-04-01 18:14

You would be morally obligated to return the stolen property to its original owner. BTW… I’m don’t necessarily believe that taxation=theft, but if people thought of it that way more often, we would have a more responsible government. I was playing devil’s advocate.

hecker - 2011-04-01 18:16

I agree that many people hold views in some areas that are libertarian in nature, but I disagree that this warrants calling them libertarians, or even libertarian sympathizers. For example, consider a “high liberal” (to use the technical philosophical term) who believes strongly in civil liberties (e.g., freedom of speech and religion) and social liberties (e.g., that marijuana possession should be legal), but also believes that government should severely restrict the economic freedom of people to enter into business contracts or privately own various means of production. I wouldn’t call such a person a libertarian, and I doubt you would either. Similarly, consider a person who strongly believes in economic freedom but at the same time wants government to enforce a system of social morality based on Biblical values (or Koranic values, or whatever). I wouldn’t call such a person a libertarian either. Classical liberalism, from which libertarianism sprang, holds that economic, civil, and social liberties are all equally important and worthy of protection. I think the number of people who are “classic liberals” or libertarians in that sense is fairly small.

Corey Andrews (cacoreya@yahoo.com) - 2011-04-01 18:21

I may just me me, but I don’t thinks there’s a majority of people who support drastic economic intervention or legislating the Bible. Those groups only seem like a majority because they talk the loudest.

Corey Andrews (cacoreya@yahoo.com) - 2011-04-01 18:22

*It may

I happen to be a life-long Democrat. Why would I be interested in libertarianism? My casual interest goes back a ways to my space activist days (when I encountered a lot of libertarians) and continued through my time working for Silicon Valley IT companies (yet more libertarians) and working in the free and open source software space (ditto). However I’ve been paying more attention to libertarian ideas lately for three reasons:

• First, I’m with Thomas P. M. Barnett and others in thinking that the key to future US and world security is growing the middle class in developing countries and integrating more and more countries into the global economy. That means that spurring economic growth around the world is critical, and I think that’s best done through free markets that can drive technological and business innovation and free trade that can spread the benefits of such innovation around the world.
• Second, I believe that recent years have demonstrated the power and relevance of large-scale Internet-enabled voluntary collective action, as seen in Wikipedia, the Linux and Mozilla projects, and so on. I think such activities are valuable and should be encouraged, and to do so I think we need to think outside the “government vs. the market” box our political dialogue is often stuck in.
• Finally, I believe that at least in developed countries we’ve reached the limit of how big government can be. Excessive public debts, entitlement costs, and high defense spending (at least in the US) are going to make it harder for government to fulfill the key functions I believe it has: providing public goods (beyond just defense), working with market actors and civil society to create the “rulesets” needed for the smooth functioning of an advanced society, and (where it makes sense) helping make it possible for all people to fulfill their potential within such a society. That means every dollar of government discretionary spending has to be spent well, and all government efforts need to complement and not attempt to replace the free market and civil society.

This doesn’t mean that I’m now a libertarian, or planning to become one anytime soon. Most notably, I don’t share core beliefs held by many doctrinaire libertarians, such that taxation is theft and that a democratically-elected government is morally equivalent to an organized criminal enterprise. However I don’t think it’s necessary to buy into the stereotypical libertarian belief set to find many libertarian ideas worth considering as a basis for public policy.

It’s also true that not all libertarians fit the stereotype. This has always been true, but it’s become more apparent in recent years, as demonstrated in the writings of Brink Lindsey (of “liberaltarian” fame), Will Wilkinson, and others. And that brings us back to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog (or BHL, as its fans fondly refer to it). As Matt Zwolinski wrote in the first post,

I’ve created this blog as a forum for academic philosophers who are attracted both to libertarianism and to ideals of social or distributive justice. What we have in common on this blog is an appreciation for market mechanisms, for voluntary social cooperation, for property rights, and for individual liberty. But we appreciate those things, in large part, because of the way they contribute to important human goods—and especially the way in which they allow some of society’s most vulnerable members to realize those goods.

That’s a sentiment I can get behind, hence my interest in BHL. The BHL bloggers have been very active since the blog began less than three weeks ago, and it’s hard to pick favorites. However here are some personal highlights from my reading thus far:

• “Neoclassical Liberalism: How I’m Not a Libertarian” and “Neoclassical Liberalism vs High Liberalism,” by Jason Brennan. Historically the term “liberal” didn’t mean what most people mean by it today, but rather meant someone who is “committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets” (to quote Wikipedia). In this spirit Brennan and others are promoting “neoclassical liberalism”: “Neoclassical liberals combine a classical liberal commitment to economic liberty with a modern or high liberal commitment to social justice. . . . They think the economic liberties share the same high status as the other liberties. However, neoclassical liberals also believe that this need not come at the expense of social justice.” (“High liberals” is Brennan’s term for “liberals” in the common sense used today.) This was an interesting post for me because neoclassical liberalism is probably closest to my own position as it’s evolved over the years.
• “Exploitation and Social Justice” by Matt Zwolinski. A good discussion of the moral issues around sweatshops, minimum wage laws, and other cases where many libertarians argue that the state would better help the poor by taking a laissez faire attitude: “Mutually beneficial exploitation is often something legal regimes should tolerate, and this point counts in favor of the classical liberal vision of the state and against the recommendations often made by those on the left. But whether a transaction counts as ‘harmful’ or ‘mutually beneficial’ depends on what we take as the baseline. . . . One point that those on the left have often made, and which classical liberals ought to take much more seriously, is that capitalist systems as they actually exist . . . have often rigged the baseline to the detriment of labor and to the advantage of capital. It will not do to argue that transactions in a free market are always mutually beneficial and therefore non-exploitative.”
• “Overlapping Consensus Libertarianism or Why Convergence Arguments Are Cool” by Daniel Shapiro. A discussion of how best to gain support for libertarian policies: “Rather than looking for one or the best moral or political theory, [ground] libertarianism by showing it is compatible with a variety of reasonable approaches. . . . Put all your effort into showing that one kind of political theory is the correct view, and supports certain principles or institutions, then if it turns out your theory is mistaken, you have no support for your principles or the institutions you support. But if your principles or institutions are supported by a wide variety of political theories or perspectives then you avoid this problem.” I like this approach, because I’ve always been annoyed by what I call “I’ll prove it to you” libertarians who use logical deduction from self-selected axioms to try to convince you that libertarianism is the only choice open to the truly rational person.
• “What You Wish They Would Read” by Matt Zwolinski. Lots of great suggestions for libertarian writings that (modern) liberals should read, and vice versa.
• “Fairnessland and Economic Growth” by Jason Brennan. A thought experiment to provoke thinking about questions around income inequality and the effects of economic growth. “Suppose it turned out, empirically, that improving the income level of the poor at any given time by equalizing incomes eventually leads to the poor in that society having less than they otherwise would have had under a less equal but faster growing scheme. If so, which is preferable, all other things equal? A. Equalize things now so that the poor now do much better. B. Allow for growth so that the poor in the future do much better.”

I could go on quoting from BHL for a while, but I’ll stop here. The bottom line is that whether you call yourself a “liberal” or a “libertarian,” if you’re not content simply to parrot the stereotypical political arguments that go with those labels then you absolutely need to be reading this blog.

TeeJay - 2011-03-23 12:15

Fantastic post, thanks for the info. I can feel my workday efficiency dwindling as I fall down the BHL rabbit hole. Appreciate the recommendation and the additional insight!

hecker - 2011-03-23 12:21

Glad you like the recommendation. Note that it’s even more of a time-sink because the comments are also well worth reading.

JL (jonlemich@gmail.com) - 2011-03-23 16:41

As a 30-something, in my formative years I got to watch big corporations globalize the stuffing out of the rust belt and watch NAFTA soak the Northern half of Mexico in sweatshop labor and hyperviolent, gang-infested poverty. If you weren’t in IT, you would see all the middle-class jobs being free traded right out of the developed world. But maybe you will see it; about four years ago, they started outsourcing help desk and IT support. It won’t be long before the code monkey jobs most HoCo techies cut their teeth on are all shipped overseas where labor is cheaper. Howard County is an example of the fruits of neo-mercantilism. We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq to protect American economic interests, and Libya now too. All that war meant tons of money for the HoCo LoCo defense contractors that made Columbia and EC (plus AA Co) the #2 city to live in. I don’t mean to sound like I’m defending the Bush wars or neo-mercantilism, because I’m not: As became evident in the last 8 years, when corporations get freedom, they use it to influence government spending and policy and write the regulations that benefit them and hurt the citizen (e.g. DMCA, Citizens United, Haliburton contracts, Too Big To Fail) – the “combination” Adam Smith warned about in Wealth of Nations. I’m all in favor of social liberties, but free trade tends to stop being free pretty quickly as corporations merge and devour each other (Microsoft, Bank of America, Comcast, AT&T) and write their own rules.

hecker - 2011-03-23 23:37

JL: I don’t have time to write a point-by-point response, but a libertarian writing from a libertarian point of view (especially a BHL-style libertarian) would likely argue that a lot of the ills you point to are not caused by free markets and free trade per se, but rather are a function of corporate capture of government, military spending beyond that justified by national self-defense, and prohibitionist policies (i.e., the “war on drugs” and the problems it causes in countries like Mexico). The issue of US competitiveness and jobs moving overseas is a real one. My personal bet is that in the long run having a growing middle class in countries like India, China, Brazil, Indonesia, etc., will be good for the US economy, expanding the market for our goods and services. However there will be a lot of short-term dislocation along the way, and that’s where I depart from doctrinaire libertarians in seeing a positive role for government to cushion the dislocations where possible and help provide people with the capacity to succeed as the economy evolves.

Bill Bissenas (billbissenas@yahoo.com) - 2011-03-30 00:02

I know Corey, he’s a frequent contributor to my facebook page. I wish him well on his blog. He’s a bright young man who may help stop the socialism that infests Howard County.

hecker - 2011-03-30 02:58

Bill: Thanks for stopping by. I’ve subscribed to Corey’s blog and will be commenting occasionally as it makes sense.

A while back I lost a fair amount of weight and got back into the “normal” range of BMI. Since then I’ve regained some of the weight and am now just a tad above the normal range. I’ve been trying to get back down to where I was before, with not much luck.

So I’ve decided to try something different: I’m entering into a “commitment contract,” a concept that’s been the subject of academic research and is being commercialized by StickK. StickK itself sounds like an interesting service, but since I have a blog I figured I could do this myself.

The basic idea of a commitment contract is this: You set a goal and a time frame to meet it, announce it to others, and put some stakes on the table should you fail to achieve the announced goal. StickK suggests the idea of donating to an “anti-charity,” i.e., an organization or cause you disagree with, should you fail to meet your goal, and that’s what I’m planning to do. In particular, I thought it would be a good idea to donate money to one of my least-favorite politicians. But which one?

I thought about picking someone in local Howard County politics, but I don’t really hate anyone on the local political scene, and even if I did I’d be afraid I’d run into them at some local blogger event and be embarrassed. Then I thought about national politicians. I don’t really hate anyone on the national scene either (not even Sarah Palin, whom all non-real Americans are supposed to despise), but then I thought of Newt Gingrich.

The thing about Newt Gingrich is that I actually have history with him, of a sort. I used to be involved in the “space activist” movement, and knew people who knew Gingrich, who was also a supporter of space exploration. I thus had reason to be well-inclined towards Gingrich, but as his career progressed he exasperated me more and more. It wasn’t just the whole Clinton impeachment farce, it was Gingrich’s ability to say something that was actually sensible and intelligent on a particular topic, and then turn around and make some statement so dreadfully wrongheaded that it took my breath away. (George Gilder has this same effect on me, incidentally.)

The bottom line is that I have no interest whatsoever in promoting Newt Gingrich’s presidential ambitions, and that in turn makes him the perfect person to help me lose weight. Without further ado I therefore present my

CONTRACT WITH (THAT PART OF) AMERICA (THAT READS MY BLOG)

As a citizen seeking to lose weight I propose not just to pursue a goal of eating less and exercising more, but even more important, to do so in a way that promotes a bond of trust between the people who read my blog and myself.

That is why, in this era of dietary evasion and posturing, I offer instead a detailed agenda for my own weight loss, a written commitment with no fine print.

Beginning now I will take the following actions:

FIRST, I will start a program to reduce my weight below its current value of 75.0 kg.¹

SECOND, I commit to lose at least 1 kg per month over the next five months, thus reaching my goal weight of 70.0 kg.

THIRD, after reaching my goal weight, I commit to maintain it for at least the next five months.

FOURTH, for each of the first five months in which I fail to lose 1 kg, I will donate $10 to Newt Explore 2012 (or an equivalent Newt Gingrich-related cause).

FIFTH, if I fail to meet my goal weight after the first five months, or if I fail to maintain my goal weight over the next five months, I will donate $50 to Newt Explore 2012, over and above any money I may have already contributed.

Respecting the judgment of my fellow citizens as I seek their support for my losing weight, I hereby pledge my name to this Contract with (that part of) America (that reads my blog).

I will periodically update you on my progress, probably via Twitter. Also, should any of you seek independent confirmation of my weight loss I hereby agree to be weighed at a time and place of your choosing (subject to my schedule being open).

In the meantime, wish me luck as I begin my campaign. I hope that as I’m confronted with a basket of fresh tortilla chips or am lingering near the refrigerator, I’ll stop and think of someone somewhere saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, the next President of the United States, . . . Newt Gingrich!”

Note: The image above is courtesy of the Tumblr “Newt Gingrich in Front of Stock Photos.”

Mo - 2011-03-17 13:26

Hah, great idea for motivation! …and there is nothing wrong with the metric system. Now pass the Freedom Fries, please. ;)

Sarah - 2011-03-18 00:01

Haha– love this idea. And I’m right there with you on Gingrich.

charles (sutcliffecharles@hotmail.com) - 2011-05-11 01:30

That tub of lard needs to keep as much weight on as possible. The more repulsive he is, the less likely that we foreigners (Canucks)have to put up with him lecturing the rest of the world. I hope he is the Republican candidate and will buy him one tub of ice cream a day until eday.

In recent years the cost of sequencing human genomes (i.e., the DNA information that makes you you) has been dropping like a rock. While getting your complete personal genomic data is still relatively expensive (thousands of dollars), the cost of getting less complete data is now at the point where it’s almost an impulse purchase; for example, the startup company 23andme offers a service for $199 plus $5 per month that provides information on various places where your genome might differ from other peoples (“single nucleotide polymorphisms” or “SNPs,” pronounced “snips”) and some interpretation on what such differences might mean.

I have some interest in where the genetics revolution is taking us, and am a regular reader of Daniel MacArthur’s “Genetic Future” blog and a couple of others on related topics. A few months ago I read about 23andMe having an end of year sale, and thought it might be fun to spring for my own 23andMe data. Unfortunately when I went to order my own test kit and entered in my home address I got the following notice:

Notice to Maryland Customers

We are currently unable to offer our services in the state of Maryland. We apologize for the inconvenience. Contact us at help@23andme.com for more information.

I was then advised to “select another state.”

Based on a post by genealogy blogger Tim Agazio and an informative report from the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins, it appears that 23andMe has run afoul of Maryland laws and regulations that prohibit offering medical test services directly to individuals, with DTC genetic test services like 23andMe’s being considered to fall under this prohibition.

There are fierce disputes over to what extent government (both at the Federal and state level) should regulate services that provide personal genetic data directly to consumers, including interpretation of that data. Each side has its arguments. To simplify and somewhat caricature them, one side seeks to protect uninformed consumers from fly-by-night companies that scam patients by offering inaccurate tests and misleading and even dangerous medical interpretations of genetic data. The other side sees an overly paternalistic government trying to shut down innovative new startups at the behest of physicians trying to hold on to their traditional role as the gatekeepers of medical information of interest to patients.

My sympathies are with the latter view. As we saw in the “direct shipping” controversy, paternalism can definitely be taken too far, with extreme hypothetical scenarios being used to squelch innovative new services in a manner that (not so coincidentally) happens to favor incumbent providers with political clout. I believe that individuals have a right to order tests that provide information about their own genome, and that a lighter and more nuanced regulatory regime is ultimately in the best interests of the general public.

So, back to Maryland: For a state that’s looking to promote biotechnology as an engine of its future economy, it seems misguided to choke off business innovation in the area of personal genomics, especially in an era when people are living longer and are urged to take more personal responsibility for their health. I find it ironic that NEA, one of 23andMe’s investors, has two of its three US offices in Maryland, but Maryland is a “no-go area” for 23andMe’s service. It’s not so much ironic but depressing that 23andMe and similar companies can’t solicit as customers geneticists and others in Maryland who are potential future entrepreneurs in this space.

Unless, of course, they move to Virginia. I think the whole “Virginia is better for businesses than Maryland” theme is a bit overblown in general, but in this case I think it’s on the mark. The relevant Virginia law seems much more commonsensical, allowing individuals to order their own medical tests and absolving physicians of any responsibility if people don’t consult a medical professional concerning the tests’ results.

So here’s my challenge to Allan Kittleman (my representative in the Maryland Senate) and Gail Bates and Warren Miller (my representatives in the Maryland House of Delegates): Next legislative session, why not focus less on legislation that’s primarily relevant to yesterday’s industries and instead turn your attention to more sensible regulation of one of the emerging industries of tomorrow?

UPDATE 2015/07/29: Fixed various broken links.

Andre Gous - 2011-03-18 07:32

I enjoyed your article, thank you. My company, Precision Quality DNA, opposes government regulation on principle – but in the DTC market, it is an exceptionally bad idea. As if that’s not bad enough, the approach the FDA has been taking is especially inappropriate. As far as I can tell, my company is “the lone ranger” when it comes to making a principled stand in favor of the free market. More details can be read at: http://pqdna.com/hjsasp/gn02.cfm?ID=087913282360 Thank you for speaking out. Regards, Andre Gous CEO, Precision Quality DNA

Rob W (warthenr@yahoo.com) - 2011-04-12 14:21

I completely agree that this is strange for a bio friendly state to be so backwards. I would understand if they required some sort of disclaimer that the information provided is still in it’s infancy and may be improved upon as we learn more information, but getting more and more DNA out there and can only help us better understand some our history.

hecker - 2011-04-12 16:04

Rob W: Thanks for stopping by. It would be interesting to explore the history of the relevant Maryland laws and regulations around lab testing. I’m pretty sure this all predates the genetic testing controversy, and it may even predate Maryland involvement in biotech. I’m not sure if the motivation for the law was primarily government paternalism (i.e., we need to protect people from themselves) or if there was a major push by doctors or other special interest groups to block direct-to-consumer lab testing.