Constituencies Without Constituents
Two interesting posts by Robert Frank and Ryan Avent try to cope with the fact that there was a lot of opposition to the idea of congestion pricing in New York City from outer boroughs politicians, even though the population in the outer boroughs is mostly low-income and mostly takes transit into the city and would benefit substantially from charging drivers and using the money to improve transit service.
One point that I think often goes missing when talking about this subject is that you should expect politicians to responsive to the views and interests of the voters in their districts, not just the people who happen to live there. In Brooklyn 38 percent of the population is foreign-born. In Queens it’s 48 percent. In other words, some politicians probably represent districts (City Council, State Assembly, or State Senate) where most of the population are non-voting non-citizens. And more broadly, the electorate in those boroughs is probably substantially more prosperous than the population. That’s going to create a somewhat unusual dynamic. Add on top of that the fact that prosperous people tend to have more political clout anyway, and it’s not especially surprising to see that some elected officials from that part of the city are ill-serving the people who live there.
22 Responses to “Constituencies Without Constituents”
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May 18th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Oh, hell, you just rubbed the turd lamp with both hands. Poop genies in 5…4…3….
May 18th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Good point. Rotten boroughs for the 21st Century.
May 18th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Why shouldn’t foreigners who are here legally be able to vote in local elections?
May 18th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
This plan failed because it was Manhattan-centric. Everyone in New York City (all 5 boroughs) pays the same income taxes, etc. Why should residents and workers be penalized because they don’t live in Bloomberg’s golden rectangle? There was NO fee proposed for people driving cars within the congestion area – most likely to be wealthy folks.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Indeed, most of the congestion in lower Manhattan has nothing to do with prosperous commuters driving in from Brooklyn, Long Island, or Westchester. The bulk of it is a combination of wealthy Tribeca residents jumping in their sports cars to drive to SoHo, and all those poor janitors and health care workers who have reserved parking spots at their lower Manhattan workplaces. So the congestion tax would have been totally unfair to workers.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Politicians respond to the wishes of people who give them money, regardless of where they live.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Eh, that’s not the issue. The issue, in terms of the voting and advocacy behavior of less-well-off people, is that they often vote based not on where they are now, socioeconomically, but where they hope to be. This is a distinctly American deal, bound-up with the ethos of the country as accepted by native-born and immigrant Americans. We don’t get class-conscious voting by poor people because they believe they’re just passing through. I think this has done more harm than good to our politics and to government’s responsiveness to societal needs, but it’s pretty deeply rooted. Those outer-borough transit riders expect to be driving to Manhattan any day now.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
“… would benefit substantially from charging drivers and using the money to improve transit service.”
Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Matty wants to force people out of their illegal but highly efficient jitney services and onto hot overcrowded stinky dangerous buses/subways just so the State can squeeze a bit more life and freedom out of the people.
There is no situation that Matty won’t turn into a “problem” requiring higher taxes and more guv’ment control of our lives.
Only a “progressive” can so hate freedom.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Those outer-borough transit riders expect to be driving to Manhattan any day now.
You don’t have to be rich to drive into Manhattan for work. You merely have to be a bit of a spendthrift. A monthly parking spot can’t cost more than $500/month. That’s not cheap, but it’s doable if you’re really determined to do so. But few people outside of the hyper-wealthy would drive to manhattan for work because most well-off people don’t like wasting money. Which is one of the reasons they’re well-off.
At issue is that people don’t like the idea on principle. Driving’s considered a fundamental right, and having a “pay-to-drive zone” strikes those outer-borough people as an infringement on their freedom. It’s not rational, but that’s what it is.
May 18th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Why shouldn’t foreigners who are here legally be able to vote in local elections?
That’s a very good question. I think a number of states allow non-citizen residents to vote in municipal elections, but I’m not certain about it. One stated explanation is bureaucratic — municipal and state/federal primaries and general elections often take place on the same days — but the real reason is that it’s hard for excluded demographics to affect an electoral landscape where voters and especially elected officials enjoy the status quo.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
That doesn’t get entirely around MY’s point. Marty Markowitz’s poorest constituents are perfectly aware that they’re riding subways and buses every day, and that they’re having to pay ever-higher fares to do it. Sure, someday they’d like to be able to take their own helicopter to their job in the Baxter Building, but I suspect they have fewer illusions about this than is claimed. For that matter, if they made the big time, they might not work in Manhattan at all. Yet to hear Marty talk, the least among us would be left starving if people from Cobble Hill couldn’t drive their SUVs across the Brooklyn Bridge for free. Driving is considered a fundamental right by a very particular subset of the Manhattan-commuting population.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
It’s a good thought. Particularly the point about income; but I’d like to see hard data to bear it out. After all, there are affluent, un-naturalized immigrants, and plenty of poor citizens. It also goes without saying that political participation is always an issue with low-income people; while local business owners tend to be very well represented whether they vote or not.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
A lot of the Brooklyn resistance to congestion pricing came from advocates for lower-income workers who transport shipments from factories and warehouses and the waterfront into Manhattan. Congestion pricing would penalize outer-borough laborers without really affecting higher-income Manhattanites, as other posters here have shown. (Full disclosure: my wife and various Brooklyn friends have worked on this issue; she’s pro, reflecting her city agency’s bias, while the friends are contra.)
The issue is actually more complex than you seem to realize. I’d say those outer-borough politicians were representing their constituents very well. Your thinking here is simplistic and Manhattan-centric: very Bloomberg, very Sadik-Khan, both of whom are far less popular in wonk circles than you seem to realize, down in D.C.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
The clamoring thousands who ride (and even those who would have ridden) the bus and subway in the outer boroughs may not have hassled their legislators not only because of the reasons outlined in this post but because, if the revenue is not used in ways that are obviously useful for transit, you are left with more people using transit to get into the city. This leaves people who ride the bus with a shorter if more crowded, commute, and those who ride the subway would have a commute that because of increased crowding would probably be longer (the subway not having to compete with street traffic). The idea that poor people are automatically going to be “Yeah, raise revenue for the state from people who aren’t me!” does make sense, but it’s not really a rallying cry in favor of this specific policy.
Yes, this excludes benefits of less traffic like less pollution, less traffic policing relative to other neighborhood policing, lower costs of cleaning-up car-crashes, lower demand and prices for fuel, quicker deliveries to locations in Manhattan. But these are all more obscure.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Most people here seem to be focusing on the merits of the proposal Matt is using as an example.
I think his larger point is more interesting. I can say that this dynamic is VERY relevant in places like southern California. The region – and pretty close to every congressional district in it – is majority minority. However, voters and people are vastly different things. And perhaps even more, citizens and voters are very different things.
I’d suggest anyone looking at the results of the congressional districts held by the GOP in SoCal. Obama carried a good majority of them.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
the population in the outer boroughs is mostly low-income and mostly takes transit into the city
The outer boroughs are part of the city.
/pedant
May 18th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
They also apparently didn’t want to pay tolls on the Brooklyn Bridge, since only those lower-income workers who use the Queensboro Bridge deserve to be penalized. I think Markowitz’s opposition to tolls gives a certain tinge of cynicism to his resistance to congestion pricing, since we’re talking about something explicitly targeted to increase MTA funding. But okay, work out some sort of commercial exemption, or a time-of-day pricing scheme. Just because Bloomberg proposed a simpleminded version doesn’t mean the idea itself sucks. (And Manhattan-centric is hard to avoid when: (1) lower Manhattan is the obvious high-congestion area with convenient bottlenecks, and (2) congestion pricing on, e.g., Queens Boulevard would really be biting lower-income drivers on the backside. Though I wouldn’t necessarily mind huge speedbumps near major pedestrian crossings.)
May 18th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
And by “Queensboro Bridge” I naturally meant “Queens Midtown Tunnel,” regardless of what I inexplicably typed. I’m not sure of the current state of traffic restrictions on the Queensboro, but it too avoided the imposition of tolls. Which, er, only strengthens my point.
May 18th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
It is pretty shitty of these politicians to reflect the desires of the voters. How dare they.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Any discussion of the congestion pricing debacle REALLY needs to take account of the odd situation that a mayor who had no control over the local transit agency was proposing a tax that would ostensibly have improved service in that transit agency. My reading of the situation was that the public (be they voters, transit riders, drivers, or whoever) rightly determined that Bloomberg could not credibly deliver on his promises, and so they (or a sufficient number of them) turned against what amounted to a major tax increase to pour money into the bottomless pit of New York State public authorities.
There is a reason you don’t normally get politicians taking big political risks to get funding for budgets over which they have no control, and whatever Bloomberg might say, it’s not because politicians are venal and corrupt (though they are, Bloomberg and all others). It’s because taxpayers rightly assume that those politicians cannot follow through on their promises to spend the money in one way or another.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
[...] 18, 2009 · No Comments yglesias: Two interesting posts by Robert Frank and Ryan Avent try to cope with the fact that there was a [...]
May 18th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Re responsiveness of politicians to the foreign born –
1. Many foreign born persons are citizens.
2. NYC politicians are super responsive to their noncitizen constituents.
3. The foreign born in places like Queens may be as wealthy or wealthier than their US born counterparts – see, e.g., the New York Times article from a couple of years ago re Queens where the median income for blacks is higher than those for whites .