Matt Yglesias

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.