Jokes aside, the USA seems to have an enormous amount of local democracy with significant powers.
The side most obvious to outsiders is where it seems to work badly - the bad sheriff who keeps being re-elected, quirks like dry counties. But it's admirable in a way, that people have some power to determine the local rules, together with the freedom to move away if they don't like it. If local democracy were extended further, there would be more variation, and more weirdness, but perhaps it would be a good thing overall.
I often find myself really liking the idea of local democracy and wishing for more of it where I live, but then I remember the kind of insane moral puritans with nothing better to do that get attacted to local politics like flies to rubbish tips! My country has a very authoritarian instinct among many in society to ban anything that doesn't neatly fit into their beige conventionality, and as bad as our heavily centralised government can be at least it keeps a muzzle on those sorts of people to an extent.
(Note that a 'parish council' here is for a civil parish, that is the smallest type of administrative unit in the UK; it's not a church parish)
At that point, you will probably be relieved that those idiots aren't allowed do anything important.
I suppose in principle if local authorities were more important, you might get more competent people running for election onto them, but given the average quality of _national_ backbenchers, this seems optimistic.
I think we have to fundamentally change how the party system works if we're going to get people in politics for the right reasons in general, but especially in local politics. There's no reason that the people collecting bins, filling potholes, and providing essential services along those lines need to be associated with the moral abattoirs that are the national political parties for example, at least in my experience these local politicians are voted on based on an area's national political inclinations rather than any individual merit which lets all sorts of lunatics in. The first thing we need to do is break this link and make local government completely non-partisan.
I wish there was an empirical way of screening out moral puritan types with the aim of directly eliminating their influence, but I'm not sure that can be done without endangering democracy itself. A more difficult but much more ethical approach I think is to try and create new social norms that make aggressive conformity something to be ashamed rather than proud of, puritanism in any direction should be made into a sign of weakness rather than strength. We need a society that instinctively defends "witches" when the witch-hunters are in town.
> The first thing we need to do is break this link and make local government completely non-partisan.
That's impossible; political parties naturally emerge in democracies. Very few countries have the official recognition of parties that the US does (party registration, official primaries etc) but all democracies have political parties.
Even if we kept national politics partisan which I'm personally against for a number of reasons, the petty squabbles and power plays of Westminster are utterly irrelevant to the functions of local government and should play no part in its selection.
Non-partisan democracies do exist, some of them are even directly associated with the UK such as the Falkland Islands and the Isle of Man which are roughly the size of a British parish and a council respectively.
Remote work via the internet will likely amplify the selection pressure too. Without being tied to a particular location due to your job, you can now shop around for an optimal location for your needs. If a bad state law is enacted, you might see people flock to another state.
It’d be nice to see some CoL data on the international level too.
Remote work is realistic for a tiny fraction of the population, and other pressures reduce the number of available remote work jobs even further (management culture, people who have no social life without the office, etc.). Remote work will change absolutely nothing.
> Remote work is realistic for a tiny fraction of the population
I'm skeptical on this point. I think that we're already around 10-20% remote work and might get to 25% remote work in the coming years [1]. I don't think this is a tiny fraction. I'm expecting technology to further reduce the dependence on physical presence over time.
I think remote work has had a significant change (e.g. less commute time, less pollution, more family time) and could cause changes in politics too. Imagine flipping a couple senate seats in a low population density area to further a remote work friendly lawmaking (i.e. land use rules, healthcare, etc...).
I don't think most people realized that not only is remote work feasible but for many professions - especially those in "knowledge work" - it's a huge boon.
Peoples eyes have been opened and the genie is out of the bottle. I fully expect remote work to transform America to the extent that the post WWII suburbanization will look like a statistical anomaly by comparison.
I think you vastly overestimate a) how many jobs can feasibly work remotely, 2) how many companies are willing to allow remote work under non-pandemic conditions, and c) how many people want to work remotely.
I would love to work remotely, but I'm not seeing any realistic probability of that for me in the near future.
It's easier to get in the face of local politicians vs. ones hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Indeed I would argue the more we defer to national politics the worse (dramatically worse!) things get. Senators were set up to be elected by the state legislatures on purpose to encourage people to pay attention to their state legislatures. The House of Representatives were selected by popular vote.
Separation of duties/check and balances. The 17th amendment "fixed" that - and I'd say every since it's been downhill from there. Pure democracy's CAN NOT work - it's why we are (for now) a representative republic. There is no perfect system as long as humans are involved, but we were blessed with a pretty good one. I wish people would stop trying to tear it down - we know from history the alternatives are pretty gawd awful.
A very well-travelled photoblogger I used to read once remarked that no country in the world loves posting paragraphs of fine-print regulations and signs telling you what you can't do, all over every wall, sidewalk, curb, and business entrance like the US does—IIRC only a couple others (I wanna say Australia?) even came close. Most have, comparatively, practically none, democracies and authoritarians states alike. After having that pointed out, I can't un-see it. We really do love it.
