There’s a fresco I used to love: Raphael’s The School of Athens. I’m not sure exactly what drew me to it. Maybe it was the diverse historical references, depicting some of the great thinkers of the Classical world. Maybe it was just the sheer skill of the piece — how it manages to be so detailed and look so accurate despite its enormity. (It is, as I understand it, literally the wall of a palatial room in the Vatican.)
At the center of the piece are Plato and Aristotle. They are depicted to reflect two different ways of approaching philosophy. To the left, Plato’s hand gestures to the sky, inviting us to think in the realm of theory and forms. To the right, Aristotle’s palm faces the ground, suggesting that we focus on the lived reality in front of us.
I want to tell two stories with this post in an analogous way. One is theoretical and imagined — a model for a well-functioning government. One is empirical and real — an assessment of the failures of actual government.
I. Tiebout and Public Choice
In 1956, the economist Charles Tiebout published a pioneering paper called “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” In it, Tiebout tries to answer a single question: how should governments provide “public goods” whose value accrues to the public generally and thus cannot be charged for in the way that you would a private good?
To understand why this paper has been important, notice three aspects of Tiebout’s question.
First, it has many applications. Within “public goods” are things like clean air, transportation infrastructure, public schools, well-maintained parks, and so on. With such goods, everyone benefits from having access to them, and, for the most part, there are few direct trade offs (e.g., that I use a road usually won’t directly prevent you from also using the road). But with public goods, there are “free-riding” problems: everyone wants access but no one wants to pay for them. And because everyone must have equal access to these goods, everyone has an incentive to minimize their own payments.
Second, note the framework for the question. The explicit contrast is between public and private goods, between government and markets. In a market, consumers meet with suppliers to exchange money for goods. Exchanges must be mutually beneficial, and, over many transactions, prices reach an equilibrium that reflects the “true” worth of the good. Tiebout’s concern with public goods is that there’s no obvious mechanism for revealing how much one truly values a public good. You could ask someone (“how much would you pay to send your kid to a school that’s ten percent better?”), but their answer is a stated, not a revealed, preference. Because of that, you can’t necessarily trust their answer. They have incentives to downplay how much they’d be willing to pay; in Tiebout’s words, “the ‘rational’ consumer will understate his preferences and hope to enjoy the goods while avoiding the tax.” Tiebout’s paper is an early example of what we now call public choice theory, which applies economic insights and theories (and assumptions!) to political science questions.
One last reason why this paper is important: it blurs normative and positive perspectives. Tiebout’s own writing is simply theoretical; he identifies a problem and creates a model (as I’ll explain) that can solve the problem. Tiebout doesn’t necessarily say we should organize our politics according to his model; rather, he says he provides only a “conceptual solution” to the problem of determining proper pricing for public goods. That being said, Tiebout’s theory would shape many normative approaches toward federalism — legal and political questions about how to allocate power between levels of government. (As a note, when we talk about federalism, we typically refer to differences between states and the federal government. Here I’ll be treating federalism in a policy, rather than legal, context. Therefore, when I discuss federalism, I mean federalism, as Heather Gerken puts it, “all the way down” — all sorts of decentralization, from the states to cities to school boards and juries, should be understood as “federalism.”)
So what was Tiebout’s model? Simply put, Tiebout says local governments should offer a wide mix of public services and taxation systems. People then could move between localities based on what suited them: if they want nicer schools but higher taxes, then they should move to that city; but if they want worse schools, and lower property taxes, then choose that other city, and so on. People sort themselves based on their preferences. Just like you compare different phones, making complex decisions about how much you’re willing to pay versus what kinds of services you want in return, Tiebout says you, as a “consumer-voter,” choose between different municipalities based on legal regimes and public services. Tiebout’s insight is that movement — “voting with your feet” — can reveal people’s preferences just like buying goods on a market reveals your preference. And that mechanism of voting with your feet should lead people to choose what’s best for them, thus leading to what economists call “allocative efficiency,” where resources are distributed in a way that matches consumer preferences.
There are, of course, limits to Tiebout’s ideal. It is, in his words, an “extreme model.” For starters, you can only get true Tieboutian sorting if consumer-voters are fully mobile, fully comprehend different municipalities’ “packages” and able to compare them, have access to a large number of choices of municipalities to live, and are capable of finding employment wherever they want. Additionally, Tiebout’s model requires that municipalities don’t exhibit “externalities” — basically, that more people living in one municipality won’t have downstream effects on the residents of another municipality; that there is an optimal size for each municipality; and that when the municipality’s size is non-optimal, it will seek to attract or push out additional residents.
We know at least some of these assumptions are dubious. People aren’t fully mobile. They don’t typically make their decisions about where to live only based on the relationship between local taxes and public services; employment is often a constraint, such that the number of places they’re meaningfully considering is limited. And municipalities do exhibit externalities: just think of suburbanization in LA leading to incredible amounts of air pollution that hurt the entire San Fernando Valley in LA, even if the people who live in the urban city don’t drive cars as much.
These limits suggest that reality won’t achieve allocative efficiency like the extreme model would. That fact doesn’t negate the normative attractiveness of Tiebout’s model, though. We might think Tiebout’s ideal is something we ought to strive to achieve, for example, even if we know it’s impossible to fully create.
There are three aspects of Tiebout’s model that, I think, might seem appealing in particular. First, it’s grounded in consumer choice. Federalism allows for different municipalities making their own decisions about what kinds of services to provide and how to fund them. In short, federalism allows for diversity. And it provides you, the consumer-voter, with the opportunity to make that choice — to choose your own destiny.
Second, Tiebout’s model creates a kind of “market” for regulation. After all, if the point is to allow people to move around and choose to live in different places based on their desires, then it’s likely that some places will be more or less desirable. Places that “fall behind” in the race — places where people aren’t moving because their mix of public services and taxes are undesirable — will feel a need to compete for more consumer-voters. Competition pushes localities to give a better deal: find a way to be innovative, with more efficient schools or parks for less. It’s free market competition, regulation style.
Third, and more abstractly, Tiebout’s model gives us a way of thinking about the proper allocation of power among local and regional (or national) levels. Tiebout would say that there are some things you want supra-local action for, especially to deal with externality problems. You might want to regulate transportation at a regional level in the San Fernando Valley because you know air pollution affects everyone, for example. You could also think of policies that enable Tieboutian sorting as for the national level; the ultimate Tieboutian policy, I think, would be the universal basic income. But for everything else, take the European Union’s “subsidiarity” approach — devolve policymaking authority down to the most local level, and let communities decide for themselves how they want to organize collective life. In academic terms, we’d call Tiebout’s model one of polycentrism, where there are multiple centers of power.
From a theoretical perspective, Tiebout’s model has a decent amount going for it. It’s limited even as a matter of theory, though, in the sense that there’s no politics involved. Municipalities, for the most part, are to offer static packages of services and taxes, with rational adjustments in response to “price signals” of people moving in or out of the community. But in a democratic system, we also want local influence to be able to shape those packages. Tiebout points to entry and exit as methods for achieving your individual preferences — if you don’t like something, just leave and find another place. But, to take from a 2012 lecture by Heather Gerken, we ought to also think about voice and (dis)loyalty as mechanisms for empowering people.
Take those in turn. Voice has to do with expression: to advocate for change or to vote. Loyalty, on the other hand, is trickier. Here, Gerken draws upon the Tieboutian insight about polycentrism and pushes it further. In polycentric regulatory regimes, policies are made and implemented at different levels of government. A classic example: Medicaid. It’s a national healthcare insurance system mandated and largely paid for by the federal government. But it’s implemented, subject to certain standards, by state governments. And for Gerken, that implementation role offers an opportunity to exercise meaningful power. It’s the power of the servant — the power deriving from, in the language of economics, information symmetries between a principal (the federal government) and the agent (the implementer at the state level). A jury can nullify a law, refusing to apply it to a criminal defendant that the jurors believe is guilty. A street-level bureaucrat can refuse to follow the rules, or bend them, if they feel compelled to. Loyalty offers power from being inside a polycentric regime, whereas exit and voice are about power from being outside.
Let’s take a step back and think about where we are. Tiebout gave us a model for thinking about achieving allocative efficiency of public goods, where there are difficulties with properly assessing the value of those goods. He emphasized free movement of people to reveal their preferences, and his model suggests designing polycentric regimes, where you divide the locus of policymaking between a larger (national or state) government and smaller municipalities. We know that Tiebout’s model is inaccurate, in that true Tieboutian sorting won’t replicate market dynamics perfectly, but we took away some normative ideals from the model: decentralize governance, enable the proliferation of small municipalities, and try to ease the burdens of movement.
We recognized, though, that Tiebout’s model is meant to achieve a specific goal (allocative efficiency in public goods). But a proper democratic system should go beyond narrow efficiency goals. Gerken starts from a different question: “What does a democracy owe its minorities?” She suggests that exit is one way to exercise power, but that voice and loyalty are other means for minorities to wield power in a liberal (in the sense of rights-protecting), federalist society. Normatively, if we think protecting minorities is important (I’m going to flag this statement here and return to it in Part III!), then we should also think about layering our systems of government on top of each other, so that localities and states implement federal mandates, and about ensuring vigorous competition within the political sphere, an argument famously pioneered by election law scholars Samuel Issacharroff and Richard Pildes’s “Politics as Markets.”
II. Michael Brown and Ferguson
On August 9, 2014, an eighteen-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. I recently read historian Colin Gordon’s account of the killing in his 2019 book, Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs, and I thought it would be helpful to juxtapose with Tiebout’s model for two reasons. First, Gordon’s account is structural. It doesn’t take Brown’s death as an isolated incident. Rather, Brown’s death, in Gordon’s words, was “as unsurprising as it was tragic.” It was the necessary and inevitable consequence of certain structural designs. Second, those designs, I think, can help us clarify the consequences of Tiebout’s model.
Gordon takes note of three broad and interlocking dynamics that made, in his argument, police violence inevitable: fragmentation, segregation, and local finances.
On fragmentation, Gordon notes the intense proliferation of incorporated municipalities in the area. In 2010, the St. Louis region was home to over two hundred independent municipalities situated within eighteen counties across two states. Why? Home rule was a powerful tool for property owners. Gordon notes that “sprawl” was largely uncontrolled in the area, such that private development, in the post-World War II era, continues to expand outward. Suburban development would then be followed by municipal incorporation, which in turn could be used for exclusionary zoning and school-boundary gerrymandering as ways to keep property values high by preventing certain kinds of development or people from entering the location.
Second, on patterns of segregation. It’s well-known that in many American metropolitan areas, the post-war period saw a huge amount of “white flight,” where White people left inner cities for the suburbs, leaving behind almost exclusively communities of color in inner cities. Ferguson was an example of this; an inner suburb of St. Louis, the city was 99% White in 1970, and the inhabitants wanted to keep it that way. In the 1960s, there was literally a steel barrier between Ferguson and the neighboring Black city of Kinloch; in 1975, when a federal judge required the merging of school districts as part of a desegregation order, a Ferguson city council member suggested building a wall between the cities.
But things began to change in the 1970s. In part, with civil rights laws banning racial discrimination, housing markets began to open up to Black families, and Ferguson was a site for Black families leaving the city or nearby suburbs because housing in Ferguson was cheaper (and older) than in surrounding neighborhoods. There’s (perhaps to be expected) a more insidious side to this story, too. St. Louis’s efforts at urban renewal amounted to the demolition of many Black neighborhoods, with the effect largely of pushing people into the suburbs. The result: Ferguson witnessed a dramatic transition from being 99% White in 1970 to over 50% Black by 2000, and, today, nearly 70% Black. That fact, alone, suggests the potential for poor relations between the community and police. Gordon writes: “[R]ace relations are always most fragile on the frontier of racial transition. And when that frontier sits in a struggling inner suburb—its citizens mostly black, its police almost exclusively white—the fuse is always lit.”
Gordon adds a third factor to help explain Brown’s killing: municipal finance. When jurisdictions are intensely fragmented, the obvious danger is that some places will hoard wealth: draw your municipal district so that all the expensive properties are within your city and keep out the cheaper properties. This has a feedback effect. A wealthy municipality can levy property taxes to fund public goods, like schools, that in turn maintain high property values. In a suburb like Ferguson, with aging infrastructure and cheaper housing, property taxes aren’t enough. Thus, while property taxes accounted for half of local revenue in some affluent cities in the St. Louis area, in Ferguson, property taxes were consistently only around ten percent of its revenue.
There are three especially pernicious effects of this setup. First, because of gerrymandered municipal lines that separate expensive and poor properties, cities like Ferguson are forced to rely on much more regressive forms of taxation. What’s the biggest source of Ferguson’s revenue? Sales tax — effectively taking money from impoverished people who are already struggling. (One of my Pomona professors, tweeting in a different context, noted how expensive it is to be poor, and these kinds of tax systems are just one small component.)
Second, struggling cities in the area will try very hard to find new companies to locate in the area and broaden the tax base. But with so many cities in the area, there’s intense competition to attract those companies. The result is races to the bottom where places like Ferguson, in order to attract those companies, will cut property taxes even further or offer subsidies, compounding their financial troubles by forcing greater reliance on more regressive forms of taxation. The result of the kind of regulatory competition that Tiebout may have hoped for, in Gordon’s words, is “effectively playing musical chairs with scarce retail investment sales-tax revenues” as each municipality tries to undercut the others by offering greater tax incentives. From a distributive perspective, the system takes money from impoverished citizens to subsidize multinational corporations and property owners.
Third, if you’re a municipality in this situation, you’re desperately searching for new forms of revenue. And in Ferguson, that took the form of what Gordon calls “predatory policing,” where “local authorities in Ferguson resorted to fiscal fracking of the lowest economic strata of their citizenry.”
How do you do it? Easy. Criminalize trivial behavior (you can violate the law for “manner of walking along roadway,” for which DOJ found 95% of charges were made against Black people, even when roads lack a sidewalk!), tell police officers to enforce those trivial laws, and funnel those infringements through municipal court to collect fines. DOJ’s report notes, “The importance of focusing on revenue generation is communicated to [Ferguson Police Department officers]. Ferguson police officers from all ranks told us that revenue generation is stressed heavily within the police department, and that the message comes from City leadership.”
In other words, political and economic circumstances created structural incentives for increased contact between police and citizens — contact that, by its very nature, was a kind of harassment that would exacerbate tensions between community members and police. It was deeply racialized harassment, as borne out by damning statistics gathered by DOJ. And it was ubiquitous. One ghoulish measurement Gordon gives: in 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court processed nearly 25,000 warrants and over 12,000 court cases — around three warrants and 1.5 cases for each household in Ferguson. In such circumstances, is it surprising that Ferguson would be like a tinderbox?
III. Tiebout’s Nightmare
Remember the kinds of things we were celebrating in Tiebout-/Gerken-world: freedom of choice, entry and exit, the power of local politics, resistance within systems of polycentrism, proliferation of options, and so on. What happened in Ferguson? We saw the proliferation of cities as a key mechanism by which communities could segregate themselves, thus creating incentives leading to regressive taxing and predatory policing. We saw tension in two of Tiebout’s requirements: the proliferation of municipal boundaries actually was used to make entry and exit harder, at least for Black Americans. “Exit,” we saw, is perhaps more an option for corporations deciding where to locate than for citizens trying to live a good life.
In a sense, we also saw Tiebout’s success: recall that his model assumed that cities would operate largely in response to regulatory signals based around economic demands. We saw how Ferguson, located in a dense space of different municipalities, had to engage in a race to the bottom that led it to subsidize massive corporations and property owners to the detriment of impoverished consumers. Ferguson was, just as Tiebout hoped, responding to those regulatory signals. Notably missing, as a corollary, was politics in any representative sense. How could it be, one might ask, that a city that is seventy percent Black has such regressive, anti-Black policies? What happened to “voice” and “loyalty”? What happened, to return to Gerken’s question, in terms of what a democracy owes its minorities?
An obvious answer is that we know local politics aren’t representative, in that turnout is consistently skewed toward White and more affluent interests. We also know that public sector unions are highly influential in local politics, which perhaps helps contextualize why, in Ferguson, the city was simultaneously complaining about having lost substantial tax revenue post-financial crisis and yet was building a new fire station, renovating its police station, giving large raises to all municipal employees, and purchasing new police cars. Maybe Ferguson represents the triumph of “voice” and “loyalty,” not the absence. Maybe “voice” and “loyalty” are simply highly skewed in Ferguson, which is why local community interests seem so poorly served by a system of regulatory competition and home rule.
Three general takeaways, I think, of this convoluted line of thinking.
First, and most obviously, I think I ought to be more careful when thinking about the relationship between normative and empirical arguments. Since my first summer in college, I’ve been relatively “pro-federalism,” in the sense that I bought many of Gerken’s arguments about the value of decentralization and of facilitating intergovernmental conflict. I still do hold many of those values: the way that federalism accommodates diversity, the way it enables people to “dissent by deciding,” and the way it elongates conflict are all, I think, valuable. But I notice in myself a tendency, especially when thinking of constitutional and structural questions, to find ambivalence: federalism can enable both progressive opportunities (say, San Francisco issuing same-sex marriage licenses and forcing the issue onto the national stage) and regressive opportunities (see, e.g., segregation). As a matter of law, I think that tends to be true. But as a matter of reality, I think there are important empirical questions about when each of these is likely — and when a facially neutral structure can slant in favor of a certain side because of environmental characteristics, like distortions to representation.
I’ve noted before that I think representation is the crucial question underlying most political issues. Here, representation is important in two distinct ways. As a matter of practice, we need to think about how federalism leads to different kinds of representation, and whether that’s a good thing. Federalism certainly enables minorities that are locally influential to gain power. In a country where voting patterns often differ based on race, it’s important that racial minorities have opportunities to gain political power — but if everything were a national referendum, those minorities would be guaranteed to lose on any issue that splits people by race. But the scope of “minorities” can mean a lot of different things beyond racial minorities: it can also mean propertied interests or other local interest groups (like public-sector unions). What’s the right “image” to have in our head when we think “minorities”? That’s fundamentally a question of representation, and it’s not an easy one to answer.
Similarly, as a matter of theory, we ought to think about how much we think Tieboutian sorting is really descriptively accurate versus how much Ferguson seems representative of how most governance in polycentric regimes operates. We know for sure that there are examples of Tieboutian sorting: just think about how elderly folks move to Florida because of the tax system, or how all companies are incorporated in Delaware because of their corporate governance laws. Which example is more representative for thinking about how regulatory competition actually happens — Delaware’s corporate-governance laws or St. Louis’s tax and racial politics?
Second, Tiebout’s model, and I think public choice theories in general, focuses a lot on economic incentives. It designs institutional structures based on an understanding of how rational actors will respond. I think it’s worth noting, though, that institutions structure not just the decisions we make but how we approach decision making more generally. Tiebout emphasizes entry and exit. Gerken helps us understand that exit trades off with other ways of exercising power. If you pick up your bags and leave, you’re much less willing to engage in community organizing, to exercise voice. If you exit by quitting your job as a political insider, you’re no longer able to exercise the power of loyalty. Similarly, the more embedded you feel within a community and the more you see your fate as tied to that community’s success, the more likely you are to seek to influence it rather than to exit.
We can push this insight further. In seeking allocative efficiency, Tiebout emphasizes that we need many choices of municipalities: we need highly fragmented cities so that each can offer us a different mix of public services and taxes. But fragmentation narrows the scope of one’s imagined community; as Michael Howell-Moroney writes, reflecting on Tiebout’s essay in 2008, fragmentation “has a tendency to bracket the individual resident’s sense of responsibility, weakening the sense that problems such as concentrated poverty are a concern for someone outside the place in which they occur.” Fragmentation perpetuates fragmentation: once you’ve hoarded the public goods and high property values, you’re going to protect it. Institutional design degrades our moral responsibilities. The community across the road might be physically close, but if that road is the municipal boundary, then it’s their problems versus ours. The lines between municipalities, Howell-Moroney writes, “tend to create a myopic patchwork of interests in which communities seek their own self-interest in isolation, sometimes to the detriment of other communities.”
Third, and finally, I want to point out that both Gerken’s and Tiebout’s models depend on some idea about the “normal” conditions of politics in a properly functioning democratic, federal system. For Tiebout, it’s about access to transparent information, meaningful ability to exit, and cost internalization (i.e., that externalities, like air pollution, are properly priced by the local government). For Gerken, it’s about meaningful representation in exercising voice and loyalty. She doesn’t say this, but I think her model requires proper representative institutions — parties that seek your vote, voting systems that enable you to exercise your right to vote, and so on — as well as meaningfully representative bureaucracies that can exercise loyalty in a responsive way to the public’s interest.
Neither of these arguments should be surprising. Both Tiebout and Gerken seek to define politics in terms of structures, not an ideal of public good. It’s about setting up a machine that will run itself properly. For Tiebout, that machine is like a market, and so you need to design your polycentric system to mirror how a market sends price signals and so on. For Gerken, it’s about making sure the machine properly enables political conflict.
I want to take a quick detour into election law, because that’s Gerken’s intellectual heritage — and I suspect it influences her arguments even though the citations in her paper don’t make that apparent. In 2006, Gerken wrote an essay describing the core question dividing election law scholars at the time: “do racial and ethnic minorities finally wield enough power in the political process to protect themselves?” Have we, in other words, “reached the stage of ‘normal politics’”? This question echoes that famous Issacharoff and Pildes paper I mentioned earlier (“Politics as Markets”), where they say the core issue for courts is to prevent “partisan lockups” of the political system. Just like competition law ought to block monopolists from securing their monopoly power, the law of democracy ought to block parties from unfairly protecting themselves from political challengers.
Tiebout’s and Gerken’s models may work well under conditions of normal economics and normal politics. But are we there yet? And if we aren’t, should our goal be to approximate those models with our institutions and hope that everything else will work, or should we abandon them for different understandings of good governance?
This post is already too long, so I won’t try to answer those questions in any justified way. But my personal gut is that Tieboutian sorting is descriptively accurate primarily for very narrow classes of entities: particularly mobile companies (e.g., in industries that don’t require much human capital) and particularly uprooted people (e.g., tech workers who have been fleeing California).
For the most part, I think our politics ought to lean in favor of voice and loyalty rather than exit as a strategy for achieving allocative efficiency. I think a politics of full sorting is a rather anti-democratic strategy because it holds no normative commitment to building communities that last. At a certain point, the logical extremity of the Tiebout model, as he writes, is to “reduce the solution of the problem of allocating public goods to the trite one of making each person his own municipal government.” That’s no way to run a society. Also, even if it were, I think most people can’t live their lives uprooted. They feel a need to find lasting connections. Tiebout recognized that barriers to exiting — those non-tax/public-goods reasons for staying — impede the ability of voting by your feet to enable allocative efficiency. We need other tools for achieving allocative efficiency, and those reside, I think, primarily in terms of voice.
The next question, then, is whether we’ve achieved “normal politics” — whether people can exercise their voice (or loyalty) effectively. I think the answer is “yes” and “no.” On the “yes” side, it’s clear that our representative institutions today are better than they were in the 1960s, when Southern Democrats had a monopoly on politics through Jim Crow laws and racial terrorism. And I also think it’s true that our national level institutions have gotten much closer to “normal politics.” It’s certainly troubling that the Republican Party has been increasingly relying on vote suppression to win elections. But what’s different today is that much voting rights litigation and advocacy is now conducted by the Democratic Party. Voting rights obviously are still in danger, and we should have agreement between the parties about protecting them vigorously. But the core Issacharrof and Pildes insight is that oligopoly collusion is very different than oligopoly competition. Our electoral system structurally leads to two parties, and so the real risk with politics is if both parties agree to exclude people — which is exactly what happened for so long with Black Americans after Reconstruction ended. In contrast, two-party politics, when properly functioning, pits two sides against each other. And that’s happening today on a variety of issues that does enable racial minorities to win, at least sometimes. (Think about how the massive stimulus will cut child poverty among Black Americans by 52% and Native Americans by 61%, compared to only 39% of White Americans.)
None of that is to say that our political institutions work well, even if our party system might resemble some aspects of “normal” politics. Certainly our representative institutions distort political conflict: the Senate has massive malapportionment problems that get transferred into the presidential election system; the House has (comparatively smaller) problems of malapportionment but is also riddled by gerrymandering. But I think our national institutions are much closer to “normal politics” than lower levels of government, which are much more distortionary. There are institutional fixes that I suspect would help (I haven’t fully thought through a lot of these though!): elimination of non-partisan elections at most state levels; non-partisan redistricting; elimination of off-cycle elections; and revitalization of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision. There are also non-institutional but important factors, such as the vibrancy of local newspapers, the state of civic education, and levels of local associational life, that are necessary to buttress a vibrant local democracy. We haven’t achieved “normal” politics across the country, especially when it comes to local and state government. Until we have, I think it’s reasonable to be skeptical of ideological pro-federalism claims unmoored by specific contexts.
* * * * *
Rose: Last weekend, I had calls with some of my old high school friends. It was really nice to see them and hear how they’re doing!
Bud: Classes are going to end in a few weeks, which will give me much more time to focus on my dissertation, which is exciting.
Thorn: I spent a bunch of time last week on a piece of writing, and I got feedback that essentially required me to redo the piece completely. It felt really dispiriting, especially because I had spent something like four hours just on cutting the piece to get to a word limit, and now I have to basically start over after someone reorganized the piece, rewrote almost every sentence, and cut out a substantial part of the essay that ruins its logical flow.
Gratitude: I learned about an MIT-run election science working group, where election scholars get together and talk about papers/stuff they’re working on. I got a recommendation to look into the group to help with dissertation work, and the first meeting I’ve been able to make was this last week. It was pretty cool! It was intimidating to be around lots of very smart political scientists, but I’m grateful that I could be a fly on the (Zoom) wall.