Politics

When Bad Things Happen to Good Governments

February 7, 2018 By Otis White

When we talk about good management, we’re really talking about two things: Doing the right things and doing them in the right way. The vast majority of management advice is about the second part, doing things in the right way.

But what about the first? How does a government know the right things to do? And what can you do if a government loses its way?

It isn’t a hypothetical question. I’ve seen governments that were lost. Many cities staggered through the 1960s and 1970s, attempting one half-hearted solution after another as their middle classes fled, downtowns declined, and businesses moved to the suburbs. It took decades to find a set of strategies for turning things around.

And today, it seems to me, it is states that are most at risk, due not so much to overwhelming problems as to divide-and-conquer politics and ideology. We’ve seen it recently in places like Kansas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, where narrowly elected legislative majorities rammed through laws punishing labor unions or gay citizens, recklessly outsourcing public services, or cutting taxes to the point that education funding was in jeopardy.

I’ve detailed elsewhere why some states have lost their way. But a more interesting question is, what can we do now? How do you put a government back on track once its elected officials have jumped the track?

My answer: Take a page from what local governments learned about turning to the citizens. Starting in the 1980s, some cities started convening residents in open-ended discussions about what they needed and wanted, using a process known as “visioning.”

It was based on two principles. First, you ask citizens things they know from their own experiences, such as the kind of city or neighborhood they want to live in. Second, you let them talk about these things first in small groups, and then report out their ideas. The process tends to refine the ideas and ground them in reality.

Out of this process came demands for many of the things that make cities work today: walkable neighborhoods, lively downtowns, new investments in parks and trails, greater collaboration between schools and local government, transit improvements, and bike lanes. In recent years, these conversations have turned up a new concern, that urban success is depriving cities of the human diversity that fuels them.

Could such conversations be held across an entire state? And if so, who should hold them? State legislatures would hardly be the ones to ask citizens how to fix the problems they’ve played such a large role in creating.

The answer to the first question is yes, there’s no reason we can’t scale visioning to the size of a state. As for the second question, I would like to nominate a surprising convener: state political parties.

My reason is simple. Bad politics are at the heart of what ails state governments today. And the way to fix bad politics is with good politics. If one party (probably the minority party) listens to citizens in a systematic way, reports honestly what they say, and builds its legislative agenda around those desires, it will change politics for the better . . . and possibly make a majority out of the minority party. Warning: Running a dishonest visioning process, one in which you stack the meetings with partisans or report only the ideas you like, is worse than running no process at all. My advice: Trust the process.

But trust it to do what? What is it that citizens are likely to say in these meetings? Well, no one can know for sure until the meetings are held, but based on my experience at the local level, they’ll ask for things that can make their lives and communities better. Sensible things like better public schools, greater access to vocational and higher education, more transportation options, help with economic development, and amenities that might help their cities or towns hold on to their young people. For the most part, they won’t demand things that punish other citizens, satisfy extremist groups, or reward special interests.

In this way, citizens can help focus states once more on their serious work in human development, economic development, and infrastructure. This won’t thrill the ideologues. But it’ll delight the citizens.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Josh Graciano licensed under Creative Commons.

How Citizen Engagement Could Save State Politics

October 24, 2017 By Otis White

Until recent years, I did not pay much attention to state politics. My interests are local, with a particular interest in how people come together to solve problems in cities and regions.

But increasingly I’ve found myself worrying about state governments—and, in particular, their legislatures—because something troubling is happening there. The immediate problem is that we are seeing a wave of “preemption” legislation, laws aimed at forbidding cities from doing things state legislators don’t like.

Now, I am not opposed to all preemptions. If local governments habitually pass ordinances discriminating against minority groups, rewarding cronies, or favoring one form of real estate development over another, I think state governments ought to step in. (The courts usually do a good job of stopping isolated problems.) I also think state governments have a role in preventing cities, counties, school districts, and authorities from spending themselves into insolvency.

But this wave of preemptions has nothing to do with bias, corruption, favoritism, or profligacy. It’s about forbidding local governments from doing things that legislators oppose for political reasons—things like ordinances protecting gay citizens, enacting minimum wages, taxing sugary sodas, restricting fracking, or regulating the use of plastic shopping bags. The Texas legislature even considered several bills limiting cities’ ability to preserve their tree canopies.

You may or may not agree with these local decisions. But I see no reason for one level of government imposing its political judgments on another’s. Especially when the preempting government is the more distant one.

Still, if this were just about heavy-handed legislatures, I wouldn’t be as concerned as I am. We’ve had overbearing legislatures before. It’s how and why legislators are coming to these judgments that is new and ominous.

Many of the preemptions are driven by out-of-state corporations that don’t want to deal with these issues city by city. Having a state legislature ban all cities from taxing soft drinks, regulating plastic shopping bags, or imposing rules on Uber and Lyft saves lobbyists from fighting battles in dozens of city halls.

So the corporate interests are clear. Selfish, lazy, and damaging to good government, but clear.

But why would a legislature go along with these things? Why would legislators run roughshod over a sizable portion of their voters and pick a fight with a formidable group of local elected officials?

Well, in part because they can. In most cases, legislatures can extend or withdraw home rule as they wish. And in part because the benefits of doing so (contributions from out-of-state corporations) outweigh the risks (blowback from citizens, mayors, and the media). Again, the interests are clear. Venal but clear.

O.K., but why now? Why are we seeing this wave of special-interest preemptions today and not 20 years ago? And how are legislatures getting away with it? Three reasons, I think.

First is the decline of the mainstream news media, which kept a watchful eye on state legislatures in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. There simply aren’t as many reporters in statehouses today as 20 years ago. So when legislatures act in ways that benefit the few at the expense of the many, there’s a good chance no one will notice.

Second, we’ve seen the rise of organizations that marry ideology with self-interest and are aimed specifically at influencing legislatures. The most obvious is the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC, the right-wing organization behind many of the preemption measures and a lot of other bad ideas that have spread from state to state. (For a glimpse of how ALEC works, read this New York Times editorial.) ALEC has little-brother organizations in nearly every state now, right-wing “think tanks” supported by big corporations and ideologists, churning out dubious research and “model legislation.” (Who are the people in your city writing op-ed articles that call public transit a boondoggle and promote private-school vouchers? It’s likely someone on the payroll of one of these state-level mini-ALECs .)

Finally, some state politicians have learned to use distraction and division as a strategy. That is, they use emotional but symbolic issues (in the 1990s these were called “wedge issues”) to create smokescreens for their real interest, which is passing laws that few would support—if they knew about them.

This explains the bathroom bills, which are unadulterated acts of demagoguery. You probably remember the one in North Carolina that set off a national firestorm of protests and boycotts, resulting in the legislature’s retreat. Surely, given that experience, no other state would go down the same road, right? On the contrary. Similar bills have been introduced (and passed) in other states.

Why? Because, in truth, the North Carolina bill accomplished what it set out to do: It divided voters over symbolism while distracting them from issues of substance. The odds of a North Carolinian sharing a public restroom with a transgender person were small to begin with. The chances that any harm would come if he did were . . . zero. And yet for a year this became the dominant political issue in North Carolina—more discussed than education, transportation, water, economic development, the environment, or any other issue that might actually affect the state’s citizens.

Over the years, ALEC and its allies have gotten good at driving wedges and laying down smokescreens with constitutional amendments forbidding gay marriage, crazy concealed-carry laws (and now, laws permitting silencers!), so-called religious liberty laws, elaborate voter-suppression efforts, and other legislation aimed at riling half the citizens of a state while rallying the other half. This is politics at its worst: distracting, destructive, and dangerous. And unless we figure a way to stop the demagoguery, things will grow only worse.

But how could we do that? I have a suggestion: Let a political party begin listening to the citizens. Not in a metaphorical sense, but literally. Start holding meetings around the state asking citizens what they need and want.

In doing so, we will quickly see that, given an opportunity to think about things, citizens aren’t interested in wedge issues; they’re interested in “web issues” (to use a Bill Clinton phrase). That is, issues that nearly everyone agrees are important, that unite us rather than divide us.

I’ve seen it over and over in years of citizen engagement work at the local level. With space to think about what they truly need and want, citizens don’t ask for voter-suppression laws, handgun silencers, privatized education, or the right to chop down trees. They ask for better public schools, more transportation options, new forms of economic development, greater access to broadband, and more ways of keeping young people in cities, towns, and rural areas.

But hold on. Meetings convened by a political party? Held across an entire state? Open to any citizen? Could anything good come from such an effort?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is . . . well, let me explain.

Why engaging citizens is right for today. The most obvious reason is because politics are so broken in our states. We need something to shock legislators back into focusing on what their citizens need and want, and not what out-of-state corporations and wealthy ideologues are willing to pay for.

And there is nothing more convincing to a politician than hearing citizen after citizen, from one end of the state to the other, asking for the same basic things from their government. Not in an angry protest or online petition. Not in a town-hall screaming match. But in calm, neutral discussions in small-town church basements, suburban school cafeterias, and neighborhood libraries.

Can it be done? And can it be done across an entire state? Yes. And yes. We do it at the local level all the time, so we don’t lack experience in holding civil, meaningful discussions about public policy or the ability to make sense of what the citizens are telling us. We lack a motivated sponsor. (If you’re interested in how to create civil conversations, start with this, then read this, then this. Oh, and know that we’ve held inclusive, polite, forward-looking, communitywide conversations for a long time . . . at least since the 1940s.)

O.K., but could we hold these discussions across an entire state? There’s no reason to think not. I’ve been involved over the years in visioning projects that convened a dozen or more meetings in different parts of a city or county. A state is larger, of course, but the principles are the same: to hear the voices of citizens, go to different parts of the state and ask essentially the same questions. (Here are some good ones: If your community could be everything you’d like it to be, what would it look like and how would it work? What would need to change? What needs to stay the same? Then ask: If the state government could help your community achieve these things, what are the most important two or three things it should do?)

But why ask a state political party to do it? Because it’s the surest way of repairing our broken state politics. Nothing focuses attention like serious competition. If one political party is convening meetings across the state asking citizens what they need while the other is cozying with special interests and engaging in demagoguery, citizens will notice. And eventually so will the leaders of both parties.

But why a political party? Why not a candidate? This gets us a little deeper in the thicket of state politics. State political parties are pretty feeble organizations. That’s because most of them don’t do much but carry out light-housekeeping election responsibilities and wait for candidates to emerge. They have neither the ambition nor the resources to do anything else.

Which strikes me as odd, given how important the labels “Democrat” and “Republican” have become in the past 30 years. Book after book and scholarly article after article have documented the rise of partisan identity in America. Some even see partisanship behind where people choose to live today. In many states, having an “R” or “D” next to your name is enough to ensure your re-election or doom you to defeat, depending on the district. No company in America has brand loyalty as great as America’s political parties.

So if you are the minority party in a one-party state, why not try to change your brand? Why not give those who would never consider voting for a Democrat a reason to see things differently? I believe having a state political party, year after year, holding civil, open, constructive conversations with voters—and publishing what it hears—could be just such a game changer.

But couldn’t a candidate do this kind of thing even better than a party? After all, plenty of politicians have begun their campaigns with “listening tours” in which they asked voters what’s on their minds. One candidate, Lawton Chiles of Florida, kept it up for his entire campaign. In 1990, Chiles asked people to tell him what was working in their communities all the way to election day. (The voters must have liked this unusual way of campaigning. They elected him governor.)

The problem is that most of the listening tours are just political tactics that are quickly dispensed with. Chiles’ efforts weren’t—he truly seemed to learn something by talking with voters—but he didn’t stick with it once he became governor. Candidate “listening tours,” then, aren’t sustainable. Nor are they systematic.

And that’s what we need: A new form of state politics based on listening to citizens in ways that are systematic and sustainable. And we can’t depend on candidates to do this. We need a permanent sponsor, an organization that sees value in engaging citizens year in and year out and is in a position to change politics.

And the only entity I can think of that fits this description is a political party.

So what would it take for a political party to take on a statewide citizen engagement process that continues indefinitely?

It takes a leader. Not a candidate or office holder (elected officials have their hands full with their own campaigns), but a donor, staff member, or party activist. Someone in a position to answer the three “P” questions of public policy: How do we manage the politics (inside the party)? How do we bring the public along (by positioning this new initiative)? And how do we pay for it (by finding donors willing to support such a bold new initiative)?

But what about publicizing and holding the meetings and making sense of what the citizens say? Isn’t this difficult? Well, it does require a talent for organization, a devotion to listening and reporting things accurately, and some skill with facilitation, but none of these is particularly hard to learn. (Trust me, I’ve learned all these things.) You can find consultants who can help, but if the party does it long enough, it will create these skill sets among its own staff.

So let me summarize: We have a way of changing the toxic nature of politics today. It has been thoroughly tested at the local level. It could change the way voters look at the two parties—to the benefit of the one bold enough to undertake such an initiative. It could bring purpose to one of our most underutilized political institutions, state political parties. We need just one thing: a leader willing to fit the pieces together in her state and make it work.

This sounds good, but wait a minute. What would we do with the results of all this citizen engagement? If the Georgia Democratic Party or the California Republican Party went from city to suburb, town to country asking people what they wanted, if it made sense of what the citizens needed and wanted, if it created a report listing the top 10 (or 20) needs . . . then what?

In essence, nothing. Publish the results on a website (videos from the meetings would be nice) and send out a press release. (“Here is what the citizens of Georgia told us in 12 open-ended conversations across our state.”) Then repeat the following year.

After the first year, nothing will happen. Probably not much will happen after the second year. But about year three, the media, reformers, and your party’s leaders will start paying attention—and so will the opposition party’s leaders.

Among other things, they’ll notice that, in conversations across the state, in neighborhood libraries, suburban school cafeterias, and small-town church basements, citizens asked for the same things, over and over. They’ll also see that the citizens have big ambitions for their communities—a bigger vision than elected officials—but are realistic about the state’s role. And as these things sink in with legislators, the tide will turn.

As legislators and the news media see what the citizens really want, the demagogues will look foolish and those peddling special-interest legislation will be unmasked. Members of the party sponsoring the citizen meetings will rush in with bills responding to the citizen needs. Members of the other party will cast doubt on the meetings, but that won’t last long because the needs and wants will be so . . . obvious. And if they persist in denying the needs, that’s fine too. Because they won’t be the majority party for long.

My aim in putting this idea forward isn’t to elect more Democrats in Georgia or Republicans in California, but to change state politics. It probably would elect more Democrats to my state’s legislature because it would give voters a reason to reconsider the party. After all, it’s a great tactic. (“The Democrats listen to Georgia’s citizens, the other party listens to out-of-state interests.”)

But it’s more than that. It’s a way of reorienting politics to listening to citizens and treating them as equals in decision making. No government, state or local, should ever do things for citizens. It ought to do things with citizens. With, that is, the understanding that individuals, families, nonprofits, institutions, charities, religious organizations, and other governments have roles to play in making places better. All progress in complex societies is collaborative.

It begins with some simple questions: What do you need and want? What are you as citizens willing to do to achieve these things? What could others in your community do? And what could the state government help with?

And there’s only one group that can answer these questions: the citizens.

Postscript one: I’ve learned from long experience that one thing is essential in citizen engagement, and that is integrity. Manipulate the meetings by asking leading questions or packing the sessions with supporters, and you’ll be spotted as a fraud. You must make a sincere effort to get a cross-section of citizens to attend, and you must ask open-ended questions whose answers are recorded publicly and reported accurately.

Likewise, as you compile and analyze the comments and search for common themes, your methodology must be made clear. It has to answer this question: In combing through thousands of comments made by hundreds of citizens, how did you decide these were the things they wanted?

Trust me, the other party will criticize everything you did. So be prepared to defend everything you do. (Having videotape of the meetings will help.)

Postscript two: Small detail but big consideration. Should you let elected officials speak at these citizen meetings?

My answer: no. Elected officials (of either party) should be welcome to come, observe, and—if they wish—join the citizens as a citizen in talking about local needs. But allowing them to address the meeting would open the process to charges that the results were manipulated (see postscript one). These meetings should be about listening to the citizens. And that’s what elected officials should do in them: Stand to the side and listen attentively. They just might learn a thing or two.

How to Deal with a Demagogue

January 24, 2017 By Otis White

Civic leaders spend most of their time starting things like civic projects and nonprofit organizations. It’s absorbing, complex, difficult work that rewards the patient—and, for many, nourishes the soul.

But leadership is not always sunny. Sometimes responsible leaders are called on to stop things, from bad ideas to bad people. One type you’ll run across at some point in a long civic career is a demagogue, a person elected to office through skillful lying. The lies can be about imagined conspiracies holding back the city or promises that cannot conceivably be kept. Often, they’re both: Demagogues tell people that powerful forces are preventing them from getting unrealistic rewards, but electing them will put everything right.

I’ll let you figure out how to defeat such people at the polls. But the best way to defeat a demagogue is to undercut his effectiveness before he runs for office. Here are two thoughts:

Do not take these people lightly. If someone is flooding the community with fiction, respond with the truth. Do so in the same volume and with the same talent as the demagogue.
And practice prevention by praising leaders who do the right things, especially when it’s controversial. It is in these moments—when good leaders do good but difficult things and their supporters remain silent—that demagogues take over. So have your civic organization give the mayor a “courage award.” Write an op-ed article explaining why the mayor’s actions were needed and how they’ll make the city better. Attend city council meetings and speak up for the changes. In other words, preempt the demagogues and you won’t have to face them at city hall.

Let’s say none of that works, though. A demagogue runs and wins. What do you do the day after the election when you find that your mayor was elected on a platform of lies?

First, you can reach out to him, either on your own or as part of a small group. After all, talking is better than fighting. Elections tend to create hard feelings, of course, and you may have said things that make it difficult for him to answer your calls directly, so try reaching out to someone close to him. Let the intermediary suggest the meeting.

What do you say when you meet? You congratulate the mayor-elect on his victory and offer to work with him in any way you can on the issues facing the city. And then you stop and let him talk. You’re listening for hints that, once in office and facing reality, he may become more truthful and responsible. Or perhaps responsible in some areas, while continuing his antics in others.

If he offers those hints, breathe a small sigh of relief. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s possible that this may be someone you can work with in some areas . . . as you hope a better candidate emerges for the next election. (Keep in mind: This is a skillful liar. So, as Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify. And don’t be surprised if he says something different to the next group that walks in the door.)

There’s an equally good chance that he’ll use the meeting to threaten and rant. If so, listen without comment, thank the mayor-elect for his time, shake his hand, and leave as politely as possible. Or he may not meet with you at all. Then what?

You have to become part of his opposition. But here’s the problem: You want to stop the demagogue but do so in ways that do not harm the city. Otherwise, you’ve won a Pyrrhic victory. The demagogue is gone, but the citizens are so divided and cynical, progress on the real issues facing your city is impossible.

Here’s another problem: Demagogues rise because they have a talent for whipping up their followers with lies, prejudice, and a strong sense of victimhood. They are often good at innuendo and character assassination. If you fight on their terms, you will almost certainly lose.

The answer: You have to move the debate from terrain that favors demagogues (a clash of personalities) to that which favors you (the role of government in improving your city). As long as the narrative remains “the mayor vs. the Powers that Be”—which probably includes you—the mayor will win. But when it shifts to “the mayor vs. the job he can’t do,” you will win.

And this gets to the dirty little secret of demagogues: With few exceptions, they don’t have much interest in the job itself. They’re interested mostly in the position. Often, they don’t even understand the job.

I saw this up close in 1966 when I was in high school and my home state, Georgia, elected a demagogue as governor. Lester Maddox was a small man with large glasses and a gleaming bald head who ran a fried-chicken restaurant in Atlanta and bought ads in the local newspapers railing against federal civil rights laws. He more or less dared African Americans to integrate his joint.

When they did, Maddox made sure photographers were on hand to witness him and his associates, armed with guns and clubs, run them off. Incredibly, he wasn’t arrested for this, but he was forced either to integrate his restaurant or close it. He closed it. And then ran for office as a martyr for segregation.

Almost everyone in Georgia’s political, media, and business establishment considered Maddox a crackpot. But after a bizarre chain of circumstances—including finishing second in the election—Maddox was installed as governor in January 1967. And he was almost immediately paralyzed by the job, which involved appointing people to management positions, submitting a budget, announcing policy positions, and dealing with the legislature.

As his incompetence became apparent, he fell back on doing what had made him famous: stunts. He held “Little People Days” at the state capitol, where he invited people to show up and talk with him. He called photographers to the governor’s mansion to witness his talent at riding a bicycle backwards. (I’m not making this up.) He complained endlessly about news coverage. (When his official state portrait was painted, he insisted it include an image of a newspaper wrapped around a dead fish.) When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 and his funeral held in downtown Atlanta, Maddox ringed the capitol building with state troopers to prevent . . . whatever. (Nothing other than a solemn funeral and cortege took place, events attended by scores of national political leaders and thousands of citizens.)

In time, the voters had had enough of Maddox’s antics. When he ran for governor a second time, he was defeated by an earnest state representative whose campaign slogan was “A Workhorse, Not a Showhorse” and who promised . . . well, to do the job he was running for. The opponent won with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

Maddox was undone by his own shortcomings. But his downfall was aided by a set of leaders who figured out how to handle him. What did they learn, and what have others learned who’ve dealt successfully with demagogues?

Here are seven big lessons:

Don’t return fire when attacked. Demagogues are masters at name-calling, and you can’t win by trying to match them insult for insult. Remember: They aim to turn politics into a them-vs.-you battle. Don’t take the bait.

Don’t make fun of demagogues. The temptation will be strong to poke fun at their clownish behavior, but keep in mind that demagogues rise by telling people that powerful others are taking advantage of them. Treat them as clowns and it only bolsters their claims. Not only are people taking advantage of you, the demagogue will tell his followers, they’re laughing at you as well.

Treat the demagogue like a serious politician. When he promises fantastic things, analyze his promises the way you would a more serious leader’s. Tell the public what it would cost, what it would yield in benefits, who it would benefit, and who would pay. Don’t exaggerate. Don’t condemn. Just state the facts. But make sure your analysis is widely available and discussed.

Keep pointing out the issues not being addressed. Demagogues tend to have narrow bandwidths. They talk endlessly about their hobbyhorse issues but are easily bored by other, often more important matters. Use that boredom to emphasize the winning message: This mayor doesn’t want to do his job.

Praise responsible politicians. Find some “workhorses” and praise their efforts to take on the city’s neglected issues. (How about a “Workhorse Award?”) Let others draw the distinction between these workhorses and the showhorse in the mayor’s office.

Talk past the demagogue to his followers. Some unhappy citizens sent you a message in the election that they felt neglected. Find out what is bothering them and make their concerns part of your communications. You won’t win all of them over, but you may lessen the anger that is fueling the demagogue’s rise.

Beware of the manufactured crisis. As demagogues fail, they sometimes try to gin up support by creating crises—then demanding that others fall in line behind them. If this happens, start asking questions: Is this a genuine crisis or a problem the city has faced time and again? If it’s an old problem in a hyped-up guise, how has it been dealt with in the past? How did those solutions compare with what the mayor is suggesting now? If you can direct the debate along these lines, calmness will replace crisis. And there’s nothing less useful to a demagogue than a calm city.

Final thought: Hey, bad things happen to good cities. Don’t take it as an indictment if your city elects a demagogue who throws things into chaos for a while. Cities can learn from taking a wrong turn. It’s your job as a civic leader to gently steer yours in the right direction.

Photo by Robert Palmer licensed under Creative Commons.

A Better Way of Judging Candidates

May 11, 2016 By Otis White

As I write this, America is in the middle of a fever dream over who should be the next president. Every four years, Americans endure an astonishing amount of foolishness from our politicians, and this election has already served up way more than its share. Sorry, I can’t fix America’s crazy electoral system. (Pray for us.) But I do have some experience in making thoughtful decisions about people running for mayor, city council, county commission, school board, and just about any other local elected position.

It involves pulling together a group that cares about local politics, thinking a bit about the offices up for election and what they demand, creating a fair process of evaluating the candidates for these offices, then creatively engaging voters in a conversation about what it takes to be a good officeholder. What the group creates, in effect, are job descriptions for elected officials. And that act alone is a big step forward—for the group and (depending on how effective it is at engaging the citizens) the voters as well. I know. I’ve seen this approach work in two different cities. It might work in your city, too.

I was launched into this sideline in 2001 when the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce asked my help with one of its affiliate organizations, the Committee for a Better Atlanta, whose sole purpose was to evaluate candidates for local elected office. Most of the time, the Committee slumbered. It awakened for a few months every election cycle, interviewed candidates, announced its findings, then went back to sleep. In that period, it worked like a newspaper editorial board or the endorsement committee of a political interest group: sitting down with the candidates, listening to their ideas, asking about things of interest to the group, then announcing who should get the job.

But two things were different in 2001. First, the Metro Atlanta Chamber did not want the Committee for a Better Atlanta to be seen any longer as just another interest group. After all, the chamber represented the region’s entire business community, not just one self-interested industry. And the Committee’s makeup was broader even than the chamber’s, pulling in a number of other business groups. The result was a diverse coalition of organizations concerned about Atlanta’s future, with a particular interest in its economic well-being.

The second difference was the election itself. In 2001, Atlanta was in a crisis. The mayor, Bill Campbell, had been indicted and would, in time, be convicted and sent to prison. The city faced huge financial and infrastructure challenges, much of which did not interest Campbell. The chamber and the Committee’s leaders felt the city could not afford another corrupt or indifferent mayor. They wanted this round of endorsements to make a difference.

So they asked me: Did I have any ideas that could help the Committee with its work? I’ll spare you the details, but the first thing I suggested was that the Committee meet and agree on its purpose and how it wanted to work. The results: It wanted to influence the election, it wanted to evaluate candidates in the fairest way possible, and its members were open to doing things differently.

This was helpful because I thought the three were connected. The best way to influence the election in a positive way, I felt, was to be transparently fair. And the best ways of being fair were to evaluate the candidates in a different way and present the results in a different way.

Wouldn’t it be better, I asked, if the Committee didn’t just announce to voters whom they should vote for but rather began a conversation about what makes good elected officials? One of the Committee’s co-chairs eventually came up with the right analogy: Maybe we could evaluate candidates the way Consumer Reports rates automobiles.

Consumer Reports doesn’t endorse cars. It defines the attributes of a good car (reliability, safety, performance, comfort, fuel economy, and so on), then tells you how each model performed in each category. If you valued reliability above all else, you could compare the models just for that. If performance and comfort were your things, you could look just at those scores. Want to put all the attributes together? Consumer Reports offers an overall score.

If we could bring this approach to judging candidates, we decided, the Committee could accomplish all we were seeking. It could engage voters in thinking about what makes good candidates for local office. It could point them toward the good ones by offering its assessments. But it could do so in a way that would seem fairer, because . . . well, it was fairer. This new approach began by judging everyone by a set of reasonable criteria. If two candidates were close in their qualifications and positions, that would be clear. If a third was woefully inadequate, that would be obvious as well.

This seemed like a breakthrough, but this was actually the easier part of our new approach. We had an innovative form, but what would be its contents? If Consumer Reports thought safety, reliability, comfort, and fuel economy were the elements of a good car, what were the elements of a good candidate? So we went back to the group with this question: What do you value in an office seeker? In other words, if you were writing a job description for mayor and city council members, what would you include?

The answer that emerged was that most members looked for two things: political positions and personal qualities. That is, they wanted elected officials who did the right things (and their positions would tell you what they wanted to do). But they also wanted officeholders who could accomplish what they set out to do and do so in the right ways, which has to do with ability and character.

The positions weren’t that hard to figure out. Given the city’s problems and Campbell’s shortcomings, this group of business people was focused on better city management, infrastructure investments, public safety, and stronger government ethics.

But the personal qualities were more difficult to define. After much discussion, Committee members came up with three attributes:

Does the candidate have a vision for the city and a personal vision of what she can accomplish in a four-year term?
Does the candidate have a set of experiences and qualifications that could make her effective as an elected official?
Could she actually accomplish the things she wants to do? In other words, once in office does she have the ability to implement the vision?

Once we knew the issues and qualities, what remained were mostly logistical questions. Among them:

How could we phrase questions so candidates would answer them thoughtfully and candidly? And, specifically, which questions should we ask in person and which could be answered on questionnaires?
How should we organize the in-person interviews? Should candidates be rated after each interview, or should the panel wait until all candidates were interviewed and then rate them as a group?
What should we do about candidates who couldn’t or wouldn’t appear before the panel?
Once the ratings were complete, how should we present the findings to the voters and explain our rating system?

Finally, there was the rating scale, which touched off a lively debate. I thought it should be on a 1-to-10 scale or maybe 1-to-5, but Committee leaders felt strongly it should be a 1-to-100 scale, since that felt more like the grades people remembered from school. So that was that. And if a candidate didn’t show up? He got an N/A, which stands for “not available.”

Microsoft Word - 2001_05_31 Proposed candidate evaluation matrix

How did it look in practice? Before we started the evaluation process, I offered the Committee a mock-up, using my name and the names of three chamber employees. Here’s how it looked.

We held the interviews at a hotel in downtown Atlanta. We did a training session with Committee members before the candidates arrived, including a mock evaluation in which one volunteer answered questions evasively and another completely so members could see the difference. Everyone who was a Committee member (and my recollection is that it was a big group, perhaps 40 or more) sat in on the interviews for mayor and city council president. Then we divided them into panels for the city council races. They filled in their evaluations after all the candidates in a race had been interviewed. For such an unfamiliar approach, it went surprisingly smoothly.

One reason was that we had spent a lot of time thinking about the division of questions between the questionnaires, which candidates filled out in advance, and the interviews. Our criteria was this: If the question might reveal the candidate’s ability to reason logically, we asked it in person. Everything else was asked on the questionnaires.

You could see the difference in two questions we asked about infrastructure. The first was asked on the questionnaire:

In your opinion, what are the three greatest infrastructure problems facing Atlanta over the next four years? Please rank them in terms of expense and urgency. (There was space for three—but not more than three—answers.)

In the interviews, we asked a second infrastructure question:

In the questionnaire, you identified the three greatest infrastructure problems facing Atlanta in the next four years. Taking a look at the one you ranked as most important, please tell us how you would address this infrastructure need—and how you would pay for it.

We knew the Committee for a Better Atlanta was made up of business people who had long experience in looking at resumes and then drilling down in interviews for a job seeker’s problem-solving abilities. So that became our guide: Let background and big ideas be spelled out on the questionnaires and let the “how” parts be explored in person. (Actually, I think this approach would work for almost any group.)

When we were finished with the interviews, which took place over two days, we had the candidate scores and a good story to tell about our process. Then we had to figure out how to present these things to the voters.

Today, this wouldn’t be much of a mystery. You’d create a cool-looking website, with the ability to compare the candidates and explore the issues. You would have a page about the process and how it worked. You might include videos of the interviews, along with the questionnaires and candidates’ answers. You’d have short bios and links to the candidates’ websites. You might have interactive features (build your ideal candidate!) and places for comments and questions. And, of course, you’d have a marketing campaign to catch the voters’ attention.

But this was 2001. The iPhone hadn’t been invented. Netflix wouldn’t start streaming movies for another six years. Many people had access to a slow version of the internet but not everyone. We decided, then, that a booklet was the best way to present the information, something that could be inserted into a newspaper a week before the election. Then we called a press conference on the steps of Atlanta city hall to announce our new approach to rating candidates. (Hey, this was the way things were done in simpler times.)

In the end, did it work? Did the Committee for a Better Atlanta really influence Atlanta’s 2001 elections in a positive way? Oddly enough, the chamber wasn’t as interested in this question as I was. And, in truth, there are limitations to knowing how much impact a single group’s efforts can have on an election.

I tried my hand at answering the question in two ways: First, anecdotally; then by doing a little math. I started by looking at whether there were any surprises in the endorsements. That is, whether the new approach had caused Committee members to look at the candidates in a different way. And I thought it had, at least for the two most high-profile positions, mayor and city council president.

In both cases, the Committee rankings had surprised me. The two who scored highest for mayor and city council president were Shirley Franklin and Cathy Woolard. Both were less familiar to business leaders than their rivals and generally viewed as less business friendly. So something in the process had caused this group to consider the candidates in a more open-minded way. That, I thought, was significant.

Then I looked at who won the election and how the Committee had ranked them. The candidates with the highest rankings for mayor and council president (Franklin and Woolard) had won their races. But what about the council members? As I told the Committee in a post-election analysis: “Congratulations. You now have the city council you wanted.” Of the 15 council districts, nine had contested races. Of those, seven went to the candidates rated highest by the Committee. And the other two districts were won by candidates ranked exceptional (90 on a 1-100 scale) or acceptable (73).

Together with the incumbents who did not have opposition (and, interestingly, they wanted to be rated as well; all of them showed up for interviews), the average score of the city council incumbents who took office in January 2002 was 89 out of 100. So, yes, this was the council the Committee had hoped to elect.

None of this proves causation, of course. I couldn’t say the Committee’s ratings caused a candidate to win her race or her opponent to lose. But it was possible. (Among other things, we knew that the Committee judgments influenced how business groups contributed to candidates.) At the very least, I thought, it reassured one influential group that it would have a much, much better city government than it had endured under Bill Campbell.

So, what has happened to the Committee for a Better Atlanta since 2001? There’s good news and bad. The good: It retained the Consumer Reports-style approach of grading candidates along issues and qualities. So if two rivals are close in their issue positions and abilities, that’s obvious from the ratings. If they’re miles apart, that’s apparent as well.

The bad: It no longer gives much detail about the ratings so you can’t tell where the candidates succeeded and where they came up short. That’s a shame because the ability to drill down on issues and qualities was, I thought, the key to engaging the voters about what makes a good officeholder.

And this conversation, conducted over time, can be more important than any single election. The aim should be to help citizens make consistently good choices in the voting booth. And the way to do that is to apply something we’ve learned in the business world: that it helps if you focus on the job before you consider the candidates. The critical first step in doing that, of course, is to write out a job description. Everything that follows should be about how the candidates measured up to that description. If we leave out the detail, I fear, then we’ve lost the job description.

Footnote: I got a second opportunity to run this experiment in judging candidates a few years later, when a civic group in Memphis (again, made up mostly of business people) contacted me. A critical county commission election was ahead, and the group’s leaders wanted to know if a process similar to the one we used in Atlanta might work in a city even more divided by race, class, and geography.

We went through the same process with the Memphis group (define the issues and qualities, judge the candidates by those standards, then engage the voters). The leaders there even chose a similar name (the Coalition for a Better Memphis). The issues were different, of course, but most of the qualities carried over.

One difference: This was a startup group, so Coalition members began a bit more skeptically than the Atlanta group, which had long practice in working together. But when they saw how deliberate and fair the evaluation process was, they were won over. So were the candidates as they learned about it.

And the results? The scores of the winning candidates in Memphis were even higher than the city council scores had been in Atlanta. So I told the group, in my post-election analysis, repeating what I had told the Committee in Atlanta: Congratulations. You now have the county commission you had hoped for.

And what has happened to the Coalition? I’m happy to report it’s still around and still rating candidates using the system we pioneered. I can’t say how effective it has been in maintaining its conversation with the voters.

Photo by WFIU Public Radio licensed under Creative Commons.

How to Read a Flawed Book About Cities

April 1, 2015 By Otis White

A little more than 10 years ago, I read one of the most wonderful—and deeply flawed—books about cities I’ve ever picked up. It was called, “City: Urbanism and Its End.” If you can get your hands on this book, I recommend it. My own copy is coffee-stained, dog-eared, highlighted across its 432-page expanse (not counting notes, bibliography, and index), and marked up with scribblings in the margins. Good luck doing that on your e-reader.

The backstory of the book is fascinating. The author, Douglas W. Rae, was a professor at Yale and chair of its political science department in 1990 when New Haven, Connecticut, Yale’s hometown, elected its first African-American mayor. The new mayor asked Rae to be his chief administrative officer, and Rae accepted. This, then, is a Cinderella story in reverse: where the ivory tower professor descends to city hall and finds . . . a god-awful mess. Exactly how awful isn’t explained. (He says the city was in the grips of “its worst fiscal crisis since the 1930s.”) It couldn’t have been much fun because, in less than two years’ time, Rae resigned and went back to Yale to ponder his experience.

The result isn’t a memoir but a dissertation on New Haven’s troubles. And not just troubles in the 1990s but over the past century, beginning in 1910 when, as Rae explains, urbanism was at its peak in New Haven. What followed, in his telling, was a long and more or less steady decline in population, economic vitality, housing stock, civic involvement, political health, and neighborliness. Along the way, some tried to halt the decline (one mayor became a national leader in urban renewal). But in the end the city was overwhelmed.

If this sounds depressing, surprisingly it is not. The book reads like a mystery that opens with a murder. After examining the crime scene, Rae leads us through the victim’s promising early years, through a series of bad decisions mixed with circumstances beyond the poor fellow’s control, and then on to his demise—in search of a good mystery’s two most important questions: Who did this, and why?

Three things help carry the book along. First, as serious academics go, Rae is a good writer. When he drops you into different periods of New Haven’s history, you understand them.

Second, Rae tells his story with a clever structure. It consists of doing what I just said: Dropping you into several periods, starting with New Haven of a century ago, where he introduces you to the mayor, a well-meaning small-business man and civic booster named Frank Rice. Then he skips to the 1950s and 1960s, when New Haven was in steep economic and social decline and, hoping for a revival, elected the visionary Richard C. Lee as mayor. (More on him later.) The remaining chapters are about the succession of . . . OK, let’s be blunt . . . hacks who followed Lee.

Finally, the book is helped along by Rae’s interest in decision making and his sympathy for those making decisions. So while he doesn’t think much of Rice, whose tenure was untroubled in a way no mayor could imagine today, he explains in an evenhanded way why this mayor’s highest priorities were . . . building sidewalks.

Of Dick Lee, who directed a flood of federal money into reshaping New Haven—to disastrous ends—Rae is similarly sympathetic. Given the problems New Haven faced in the early 1960s, who wouldn’t have done the same? In fact, as I read the book, it occurred to me that Lee’s greatest problem might have been his own ambition, intelligence, and political talents. A lesser mayor (say, Frank Rice) might not have found all that federal money and figured out how use it in leveling entire neighborhoods.

As for those who followed, Rae offers a shrug. Urbanism is over. What could any mayor do?

Well.

As I read the “City: Urbanism and Its End” in 2004, its first flaw was as apparent as its subtitle. Urbanism’s end? Somebody forgot to tell the cities.

As Rae was writing, cities were in fact in the middle of a great revival—a reversal of fortunes no one could have foreseen in the brief period Rae was in city hall and apparently he missed on return to the ivory tower. (Well, not entirely. On page 421, he has a small section titled “Another Urbanism?” that hints something may be going on, though he never says what it is.)

But the deeper flaw is sometime I’ve noticed in the years since I first read it. It is Professor Rae’s analysis of how city governments steer their cities. And let me be as sympathetic to him as he was toward New Haven’s mayors. This may be an area where being a political scientist is a liability, not an asset. That’s because political scientists have trouble making sense of local government since they are naturally more attuned to state and federal government. As I’ve written elsewhere, if you try to understand city hall the way you do state capitols and the federal government, you’ll miss the mark. They are fundamentally different creatures.

That may explain Rae’s belief that city governments were always “weak players” in the realm of power who became steadily weaker as urbanism waned. “Focused on the city of 1990,” he wrote, ” . . . the end of urbanism meant the end of thinking about city government as a pivotal and more or less autonomous power system.” And it’s not just city governments that were weak and slow-moving, in Professor Rae’s eyes. So were cities themselves. “Most American cities,” he writes, “are sitting ducks, unable to move out of the way when change comes roaring at them.”

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Given their weakness and slow ways, how could city after city have staged amazing economic, social, and physical revivals in the past 20 or 30 years? How could New York have come from its “Bronx is burning” chaos in the late 1970s to the safe, vibrant, seriously overpriced city we know today? Or San Francisco? Or Minneapolis? Or Seattle? Or Houston? Or even my own city of Atlanta, where neighborhoods that were all but abandoned in the 1980s are filled today with loft apartments, brew pubs, boutique charcuteries, and tattooed hipsters on bikes and motor scooters? In fact, I’ll bet that not far from Professor Rae’s office, there might be signs of urbanism’s comeback even in New Haven.

That’s because urbanism never really ended in America. For a host of reasons, it receded for a while but eventually was revived because we needed it . . . for artistic and economic creativity and even (hello, Yale!) to produce a certain kind of education, one that teaches people to live and work amongst diversity.

And perhaps because he’s wrong about urbanism’s death, Professor Rae is wrong as well about local government and how it works. It isn’t so much a forum for decision making as it is an important part of the assembly line of change in cities. Mayors may help plan great civic projects and city councils certainly have to contribute some of the parts. But they do so with the knowledge that, for anything of consequence to succeed, others in the community must add their parts—including the business community, nonprofits, volunteers, charitable foundations, and neighborhood groups. This collaborative approach isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a unique strength of cities. In fact, that may be why it was such a disaster in the 1960s to give Dick Lee all that federal urban renewal money. It allowed him to stop working with neighborhoods and start working on them. And as it turned out, he didn’t know better than they what they needed.

Having said all that, let me repeat. I like Douglas Rae’s book. In a way unlike any other, it takes you inside city hall at different periods and into the life of a city that has always struggled with great economic, political, and social forces. It helps you understand how different mayors saw the city and why they acted as they did. Finally, Professor Rae makes a convincing case for what cities have lost in the past century, although I would add that there’s much we’ve gained in those years in health, prosperity, and social justice.

But read it with the knowledge that political scientists, even those who’ve spent a while in city hall, have trouble understanding cities. And keep in mind, too, that there’s a missing chapter, the one where New Haven and other cities rediscover urbanism and find incredible new opportunities buried in old streets.

Oh, and please ignore that subtitle.

When Bad Things Happen to Good Governments

How Citizen Engagement Could Save State Politics

How to Deal with a Demagogue

A Better Way of Judging Candidates

How to Read a Flawed Book About Cities

About Otis White

The Great Project

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