The Problem of Political Feedback in US Politics
Lack of understanding and poor institutional design=bad political outcomes.
About a year ago, I saw a sign on the side of the road at a rural intersection near my house: “Stop Big Solar!” it exclaimed. I saw a few other such signs, which led to some Googling to find the following from the Alabama Gazette: Opponents speak out on Montgomery County solar farms project.
Over one hundred members of the community crowded into the Montgomery County Commission seeking information about a proposed massive 1,600 acre solar panel farm near the Snowden Community.
[…]
“There is not a lot ADEM [Alabame Department of Environmental Management] can do until the facility is built,” Singleton informed the residents. “The county can’t tell people in an unincorporated area what they can or cannot do on their property.”
Many of the residents wanted the commission to simply pass a ban on new solar farms.
“That would be breaking the law,” Singleton said.
[…]
Moore-Zeigler said that this situation is due to county voters voting down zoning in 2016.
“It doesn’t matter what it is, this is on you,” said Moore-Zeigler. “I am as much against these solar farms, but the truth is that a solar farm is not the only thing that can ruin your property value.”
“You voted it down in 2016,” said Moore-Zeigler. “We cannot outlaw solar farms.”
“We can put it back on the ballot,” said Moore-Zeigler.
“If it weren’t for the solar farms, you would be crucifying me for bringing it up,” said Singleton of county wide zoning.
In regard to the 2016 reference above, the Black Belt News Network clarifies (emphasis mine):
Despite Singleton’s sympathies, he said that a proposal allowing the County Commission to limit zoning was struck down in 2016, though he said that he has spoken with County Attorney Michael Armistead about possible alternatives.
“But the way that it is written right now, in the unincorporated (areas) there is no zoning,” he said. “You can do anything you want on your property.”
Commissioner Daniel Harris said that the commission can still try the proposal first made in 2016 and rejected again later. He suggested getting input from communities to help the commission draft a policy that would give the commission limited zoning authority.
The policy could then be sent to the Alabama Legislature to be possibly approved and then voted on by the commission.
A clarification: as best as I can tell, the 2016 reference was not about the voters, but about the Commission itself voting down a chance to ask the voters (I have no recollection of, nor can I find reference to, a 2016 initiative). The last attempt to create county-wide zoning (which failed) was in 1974. Let me stress, therefore, that the County Commission lacks zoning authority, and that people often like that fact very much except when they don’t.
Any drive around any incorporated area in Alabama will confirm the lack of zoning control.
All of this came to mind when listening to the Ezra Klein Show yesterday (coincidentally, I was approaching the intersection cites above as I heard this).
The topic of the episode is the urban-rural divide in US politics, and was an interview with political scientist Suzanne Mettler, co-author (with Trevor Brown) of the book Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy. Numerous potential posts leaped to mind as I listened, but for this post, I want to focus on the following.
Klein asks the following:
The way you describe it is: “It was not any one issue that tipped the scales but rather the persistent commonality that ran across them. From 2008 onward, rural Americans perceived an urban elite that sought to impose itself on far-flung places, controlling residents’ lives through new rules and procedures, in which they felt they had little voice.”
And you argue that the issue here is not the policy but the sense of respect or disrespect, of listening or not listening, of representation or absence of representation — that there was something sort of beneath policy that drove this.
Tell me about that sense of: We are being ruled from afar.
Let me stress that it is a long-term element of Alabama political culture that recoils at government from afar, most especially from the federal government.
At any rate, here are some key parts of Mettler’s answer:
We illustrate it in the book through a couple of different policy areas, and one is renewable energy.
[…]
So there will be a big developer that comes in — a company that cuts a deal with a big landowner — and all of this happens and agreements are made before the local community hears about it. And then people are upset.
[…]
There’s one study that was about wind farms in Indiana, and a person they quoted said: It’s not that I’m against wind energy. I’m against how it was done here.
Klein then responds to this:
I found this raised a lot of skepticism for me.
First: “I’m not against X” — where “X” is clean energy, affordable housing, mass transit — “I’m just against how it was done here” is, I feel, the most common structure of “I’m against X.”
But in “Abundance,” I spent a lot of time talking about and researching and reporting on how clean energy projects in particular are sited in different parts of the country. And what I can say for sure is that red states site all kinds of different forms of energy much more easily than blue states do because they have much less complex and deliberative procedures for siting them. If you want to build a wind farm in rural Texas, it is just much easier than building it in rural California or rural New York.
And yet rural Americans are not turning against the government of Texas for the lack of deliberative, consultative and veto-oriented siting.
So something about that felt off to me. I would think that would then lead to much more anger in red states, where it is much easier to just plow through a new development than it is in blue states, which have much more veto-oriented structures.
This all made my mind go directly to “Stop Big Solar” and the Montgomery County Commission meetings noted above.
To me the entire situation is an excellent example of how most citizens don’t understand government and mostly see things in terms of “what I want” v. “what I don’t want” levels of sophistication.
At the time I was annoyed and bemused by it all because I know that the general ethos in the rural parts of Montimgery County, Alabama (and in the rest of the state) is an attitude of “don’t tell me what to do with my land!” And look, I get it. While I live in an incorporated area, I am adjacent to large tract of cattle ranches that lie in the county. I have every reason to believe they will remain cattle ranches for the foresseeable future, but there is nothing legally stopping pretty much anything being built there. The only difference between myself and some of my more distant neighbors noted above is that I would welcome some kind of county-wide zoning system and actually see the value of some leve of regulatory power by local government.
Let me digress to provide some context. Montgomery County has exactly two incorporated municipalities. One is the City of Montgomery. The other, which borders it, is the Town of Pike Road. That’s it. The rest of the county is unincorporated. Here’s a map via Google. Note that the incorporated portion is in the northern quarter. There is a lot of unincorporated land in the county. The areas being targeted for solar farms are basically the space under the 231 symbol down to Ramer (not the whole area, but specific parcels thereof).
Apart from whatever personal connection I have to the topic, I think all of this illustrates some key problems in American government.
First and foremost, American government is sufficiently complicated that people really don’t understand who does what. All most people know is that that they either want or don’t want something. When they want it, they want to know why government isn’t making it happen. When they don’t want it, they want to know why government isn’t stopping it.
We recently had city council elections, and there was a substantial contingent of citizens who were mad that a McDonald’s was being built. They wanted the Mayor to have blocked it (because reasons) or, more to my amusement, to have gotten some different fast food chain that they preferred. Because, of course, that’s how government works.
I cannot find the precise data for the town, but the general information I can locate indicates that while Montgomery County went heavily for Harris, the Town of Pike Road went for Trump. How it is that a bunch of allegedly pro-market types think that the mayor can dictate which fast food joints are built is perhaps an interesting insight into the level of political sophistication that a lot of citizens have.
It is both not surprising to me as well as, I will confess, profoundly frustrating, to hear people who normally want government out of their lives to want government involved when something they don’t like is coming their way. Look, I would prefer it if people didn’t burn things on their property when I want to have my windows open, and some of the properties with generations of dead automobiles on their front lawns are not aesthetically pleasing, but that’s the way it works.
Klein goes on to touch on a topic I discuss on occasion and think about a lot.
I’m getting at something even a little bit larger here than clean energy. One thing that your book seems to accept and even talk about is that the attribution of blame for policy is very, very muddy, and it relies a lot on how people get their information and whether they get their information.
You talk about a particular study where Republican policies close rural hospitals, and people are mad. And the Republican vote share goes up in the next election because people blame the party they already don’t like.
I could tell a story where people don’t like the renewable energy coming in. And even though it’s coming in more aggressively in red states because of their procedures, nobody knows that much about siting rules, so they’re still blaming the party they see as connected to renewable energy.
But there’s something here about how many of the policies that you describe as particularly painful or destructive or irritating to rural America are not promulgated by Democrats, but Democrats get blamed anyway.
A major problem in American politics is that it is hard to know who is responsible for what. For example, who is responsible for the current shutdown? It is possible to make an argument for both parties, and this is why I have argued that the Democrats should be daring the Republicans on a daily basis to go nuclear and take the Democrats out of the picture (i.e., vote to change the rules to allow a 51-vote majority to reopen the government). Make the Republicans own all of this, including the insurance rate hikes that are coming.
Citizens tend not to be especially sophisticated in terms of understanding the interplay between local, state, and federal governments. Ironically, our overly democratized approach to governance (wherein we vote for a lot of offices) makes real democratic accountability a serious problem. If voters don’t know who is responsible for what, it makes it rather difficult to strategically utilize the vote to punish or reward.
Instead, voters end up falling back on assuming, as per Klein’s example about rural hospitals, blaming the party they don’t like and rewarding their own team. Or, as we see at the national level, blaming or rewarding incumbents based on general vibes.
Another possibility is determining whether certain policies are coded R or D. For example, I saw on local news Facebook groups when the solar panels thing was in the news, about not wanting “woke” solar power in the county.
Mettler argues that the Democratic Party needs to engage in active organization at the local level to try and rebuild the party. I don’t disagree with that, but I am skeptical about it achieving significant changes for a variety of reasons, and will leave that for perhaps another post.
But let me conclude by stressing again how part of why we are in the moment we are in politically is that people do not understand the complexities of government in the United States and, worse, all that complexity gets poured into only two vessels.
In short, people are rightly frustrated with the lack of responsiveness from the government, but instead of figuring out why the government is not responsive, they mainly blame the other party and move on.
This is exacerbated in cases like rural areas that are heavily Republican because there is a disconnect between who the home team is and the fact that the home team’s politics is very likely to be the cause of the consternation.
There is also the key problem that people want contradictory things. They want total control of their property, but don’t want you to have the same level of control. Or, they want rural hospitals, but just don’t want to support the spending (and taxes) needed to fund them.
And all of our electoral and governance superstructure encourages only two options, which reinforces all of this. This is why, at some point, we need a national movement towards real political reform, difficult though that road may be.
I’m reminded of this:
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing; block it out!
To sum up the summary of the summary: People are a problem.
Great post. Our society is a mess.
I’m not sure you really addressed it specifically, but the willingness of Republicans and right-wing media to outright lie and propagandize about issues is also not helping with clarity.
Somewhat related, a friend in Texas tells me that the giant AI server farms there are mostly being built on unincorporated land because Texas has the same lack of zoning. Similarly for the many battery storage farms being built, which are quite noisy in practice.
Ezra Klein is a prolific speaker and writer, so he say’s a lot of things, but I think this is a shitty way of putting it:
It’s not a veto, it’s zoning rules that have been created to serve the interests of the public. They provide an existing or prospective landowner with expectations on what can be done with the land. There are of course complications for someone considering a land development project — research into proposed and pending zoning law changes, consideration of any zoning variances needed, research of previous approved and disapproved zoning variances, statements of public officials responsible for zoning approvals, corruption, etc. But calling it a veto alludes to a kind of snotty blue-state elitism.
Demonstrating once again that the electorate are a box of rocks. A fact that confounds Democrats while Republicans gleefully seize on it. I’ll add that presumably the solar company has no power of eminent domain so they are presumably buying or leasing the land. Which is to say the landowners are doing what they want with the land. Were someone to build a swine feedlot on your neighboring horse farms, being downwind would greatly affect you. How does a solar farm hurt the neighbors, or their land value?
I’ll see your 1.600 acres and raise you 200,000.
Meanwhile, you said,
Over at LGM Paul Campos first notes that Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, “the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance”, an act of utter corruption. But then he quotes commenter Murc, of Murc’s Law, on what Dems should be doing,
I’m realist enough to see this might not be optimal politically, but so far I see no one proposing or following a better plan. Utilitarianism asks that we think through the consequences of what we do, which can get murky. When in doubt, default to the right thing.
@gVOR10: I am very much unsure of just what will change things. Of what will get a message out to people who barely bother to read anything, and just kinda scroll through their Facebook feeds and go on rants where they fill in unknown details in the way that is most unfavorable for Those Guys.
One of my best meat-space friends does this, and he’s a liberal, and well-educated. Humans are such a mess. I catch myself doing similar things all the time. It’s a constant struggle to know what is.
However, nothing lasts forever. Nothing. This too shall pass. Don’t know how or when.
@Eusebio:
I love doing zoning variances. Those were always great, you never know what you were gonna get. I had one where an old lady claimed kids were going to get “magnetized”, fly down the street and drown in a pool. The pool had already been there for years.
I only lost one zoning case. The municipality had assured us up and down that it was an open and shut matter and all we had to do was have the hearing. It was just going to be a formality. About 20 residents showed up and let the village board have it. They got the business so bad they were threatening to have me arrested for have the temerity to even file for a variance. System worked I guess. I got paid, the neighbors blocked something they didn’t, and some other municipality got the business.
@Michael Cain:
I love reading about Texas’ zoning laws. Partly because I’m a zoning nerd and partly because I actively despise every fucking thing about Texas. I always get a chuckle when a Texas fertilizer plant in a residential neighborhood blows up.
I would probably feel worse about this, but as an Illinoisan, I am profoundly done with people telling me 1. that my state is a shithole, and 2. I’m not allowed to make fun of people in Red states for various reasons. I know the problems of both my city and my state. I also know that Illinois has worked hard, in fits, starts, and fucked up ways, to make life better for her citizens. Hell, our Billionaire governor worked his ass off to raise his own taxes by getting rid of our dumbass flat tax. As an aside, Ken Griffin should be forced to go down with the ship when Florida sinks. I am absolutely sick and tired of bailing Red states and rural areas. They should get everything they’ve wanted. Including shuttered hospitals, lack of opportunities and getting stuck with rich assholes pretending to be farmers. That’s what they’ve voted for, that’s what they want, they should not be protected from their choices any longer.
@Michael Cain: I live in Texas, in Harris County, a largely urban/suburban county of about 5M people. Just pulled out my property tax appraisal report. There are no less than 10 taxing jurisdictions to which I pay property taxes. At least seven of them require me to vote on board memberships. Then there is the privatized government of the Homeowner’s Association (HOA), the rules (think law) of which I must follow is about 107 pages and provides rules of house color, landscaping, exterior decoration, etc. The enforcement of those rules is through a contractor. People are always in a continual state of agitation over those rules.
None of this makes it easier to know who to bitch at or have accountability. Accountability is for the little people.
@Beth:
I’ve been one of those 20 (usually fewer) residents many times, but I’m not so much torches and pitchforks… more like pertinent facts, plan details, and comparable projects. I’ve even been known to speak up in support of project aspects now and then.
Nobody knew governing a nation of more than 300 million people could be so complicated.
@Beth: I don’t want you or anybody else to stop making fun of people in Red States. What I want is for you to be more specific, more targeted. I have people dear to me who live in Red States. People who are trans, people who love and support trans people. And so on.
But when it comes to Ken Paxton? Let him have it. Honestly, I think most everyone in Texas hates him except the billionaire who owns the Texas government.
(Fun Fact: When I just googled “who is the billionaire who owns the Texas government?” I got the name of Tim Dunn and also Farris Wilks. I was thinking of Tim Dunn.
Let them have it too. There are plenty more targets, too.
@Eusebio: I think most of those laws were made with good intent, but its clear, I think, that many of them are being abused. We need to be somewhere between no zoning restrictions and ones that delay building for years, doubling and tripling the cost of building without actually providing better results.
Steve
@Eusebio:
It seems a perfectly reasonable description. He’s comparing rural areas in blue states to rural areas in red states. The former put up many more barriers to development through overlapping processes that give more entities the ability to say No. He’s literally written an entire book on how the confluence of well-intentioned policies make it next to impossible to get things that Democratic voters want—and Democratic politicians authorize—in Democrat-run cities and states.
@Eusebio:
I take the point, but what I think he is doing is noting that these processes have a large number of veto-points (i.e., places where policy can be blocked). And to the point of my post, there are very few veto points in building a solar plant in unincorporated Montgomery County, Alabama.
@Beth:
As a Texan and now long-term resident of Alabama, I both get it but continue to note: Not All Red Staters.
@Scott:
The contrast between Texas and Alabama is stark here, and both are linked to their very long constitutions. To be a bit simplistic, Texas created a structure with tons of local home rule (hence all the overlapping districts) and hampering the state government (e.g., the legislature meeting only every other year for a relatively short amount of time). In Alabama, local rule is severely curtailed, and often doing fairly simple things requires the state legislature to approve (note the reference in the OP about any zoning plan having to first go to the legislature).
My quippy version of this is that the post-Reconstruction reaction in Texas was to decentralize a lot of governance and create a weak state government, but in Alabama, the response was to centralize power in Montgomery, but then pretty much break the state government.
I would note that for a number of reasons, most especially linked to the removal of term limits for the governor, Texas state government has increased in power in the decades since I left.
@Kurtz: It is truly a surprise, isn’t it?
I take issue with the assertion that rural areas are “being ruled from afar”;
Between the Senate and the filibuster, American national politics gives insane amounts of power to rural areas; A Senator from Montana has 50 times the power of one from California; A Senator from Maine can singlehandedly block a bill favored by 75% of the American people.
Since as long as I can remember agricultural subsidies have been a national joke of paying farmers not to plant, but somehow no one can ever seem to break the power of agriculture. Rural areas receive far more in government benefits than they receive.
When [conservative] rural people talk about a perceived loss of liberty, what they really mean is their liberty to force others to live as the rural people wish.
It really is that simple.
It is Sarah Palin telling rural people that they are the Real Americans and the rest of us are not. It is Kim Davis refusing to let gay people marry. It is Cliven Bundy forcing Americans to give him free grazing land. It is rural religious people telling trans people where they can go pee.
MAGA is built on grievance, but the grievance is that they are deprived of the power to sit atop the social hierarchy.
@Beth: @Steven L. Taylor: Indeed, 43.2%, 46.5%, and 42.5% of Texans who voted did so for Trump’s opponent in the last three cycles. Alabama is significantly redder, but over a third voted Democrat in those elections. The winner-take-all nature of the system isn’t their fault.
For that matter, while my residence of the last 23 years, Virginia, has consistently voted Blue since flipping in 2008, 44.4%, 44.0%, and 46.1% voted for Trump.
@ChipD:
It can simultaneously be true that they have political power far in excess of their share of the population (and they do) and that they feel that the values of the urban areas are often imposed on them by Washington (and they are). It’s why so many view Trump’s excesses as a long-overdue correction.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I agree with the message, but maintain that “veto” is overly dramatic and detracts from it, since that word is widely understood to mean overriding legislation with no available recourse, and often for personal beliefs. The approval authorities in each jurisdiction are supposed to be implementing the rules, and if they are not doing it correctly, there are avenues for appeal. If the Montgomery County Commission had rejected the solar farm because of the residents’ pressure or because they just didn’t like it, then their decision surely would’ve been appealed. Likewise, @Beth: ‘s client could have appealed if they felt the law was on their side (yes, it takes time and money).
@James Joyner:
Fair point. But I have to point out that values is a loaded term, because it often means denying rights to some Other.
If one’s values includes moral opposition to interracial marriage, I’m not sure that it’s an imposition as much as an extension of protection—the primary purpose of government according to founding documents.
Or, for another example, many viewed Brown v. Board 1 and 2 as an imposition of northern or urban values.
Also, moral (value) claims in a democratic system tend to not stop at the local level. We saw that after the Dobbs. Federalism was a common criticism of Roe. But many of the same people who made that argument pivoted toward advocating for a nationwide ban on abortion.
Cheryl Rofer wrote a recent post at LGM that linked to an interesting piece about the mechanics of the (presumed) legal justification for blowing up boats in international waters. And the Yoo justification for torture. It touches on the need for moral arguments.
I’ve been thinking about it since I read the linked piece this morning. Seems relevant here.