Michael DeMoor

Truth. I constructed a whole course to persuade undergraduates of this.

Except sometimes they work and are bad or fail and are good (or better than the alternatives).

It’s all very simple and bewilderingly complex.

Yeah. I don’t know what will happen. I can only say that, on my read, the first “municipal parties” election cycle was not an auspicious success for the strategy of those who instigated it. But it may yet bear fruit. Whether that fruit be bitter or sweet… i have hunches, but that’s more or less it.

Parties exist to induce and mobilize resistance and opposition - that is what they are for, both for good and ill. The 2 parties we had here in yeg failed to do that effectively. I’m glad of that (for policy reasons), but it was a failure, I think.

I don’t doubt that media both induced (to some extent) and then exaggerated to breadth of the discontent over infill, etc. But I saw enough of it “in the wild” (community events, talking with family etc) to know that it was also real enough.

I hear what you’re saying. But giving incumbent independents a real run for their money would have seemed to me to be good evidence that the parties were “working”. I don’t think we saw that - at least in yeg - in spite of there being more than enough discontent there to be harnessed by parties.

What’s the opposite of “from your mouth to God’s ears”?

Oh yeah… Heaven forfend!

What would it take to get buy-in, do you think?

I hope someone was doing some in-depth surveying/interviewing of Edmonton voters during the election, like @jacklucas.bsky.social has been doing in Calgary. Having some good idea about voter thinking and motivation would help us have sense of where things are likely to go.

So your sense is that the results in yeg (knack mayor, all “progressive” incumbents returned pretty easily) was primarily driven by anti-party sentiment (rather than, say, general agreement with them on policy)? Without anti-party sentiment we’d get substantially different results?

How much of what we saw in #yegcc elections is explained by reactions against parties is actually one of those things that I’d like to know more about. Tough to quantify and distinguish from other drivers.

You might be right that time will entrench parties, but only if they stay active b/w elx’s.

For what they’re worth, my too-soon-to-say thoughts on the “municipal political party” experiment in Edmonton and Calgary (focusing on Edmonton, b/c that’s what I know best).

🧵- going to a long one. Skip, or buckle in (i don't have a blog to do this in... you're welcome).

That also didn’t happen in Edmonton (or, where it did in a few wards, it’s not obvious that parties were instrumental in that). Calgary got a bit more of a “conservative” mayor and council, but - again - not obviously aided by the new party structures.

You’re very right to point out the province’s intentions in introducing the party experiment. It certainly does seem that their hope was that they would result in mayors/councils that were more “tractable” for them - at least in being more ideologically aligned with them.

When you write a thread that sounds like an academic article and is half as long as one, you should expect it to get read by about the same number of people as an academic article :)

I’m learning. But I’m not going to change.

Now, that’s only one cycle. Maybe if we “stick with it” (the province seems to be planning that), (a)-(d) will start to crudesce. But it’s not an auspicious start for the “experiment.”

(d) If I were thinking of running for mayor/council in 2029 would I think I needed to join a party? Nope. I’d be more likely to think it would be a hindrance.

The other was less leader-driven but maybe more obviously “ideological” in a “populist” way. However it got no one elected and its candidates were pretty heterogeneous.

(c) “Legible” parties. In Edmonton we had 2 prominent parties, one organized around a mayoral candidate (Cartmell) who… uh… is not the sort of charismatic, highly visible person that you’d have a personality-driven party form around.

(b) Enduring parties – we’ll see, but it seems relatively unlikely. This would require consistent leadership, membership, organization, etc. and I don’t see it (correct me, of course).

(a) Better turnout/participation – Not really. There might be other explanations for this, but turnout was way down. The only thing that went up was donations to certain party-affiliated candidates, but that was driven by institutional donors and didn’t result in better results.

So, after one election cycle with parties, have we seen those results?

(d) Most viable candidates coalescing under the banner of a limited selection of parties.

Political parties also need to offer something to (potential) candidates. For a party system to be viable, it needs to make a candidate much more likely to win if they run under a party banner. So we’d expect to see:

(b) Parties that endure between multiple election cycles – to provide both messaging consistency and ongoing avenues for political mobilization

(c) Parties organized around a pretty explicit/observable ideological program or else a well-known personality/leader

If a party system is effective in doing these things, we should expect to see some things:

(a) Better turnout or public involvement – because they are more confident in their understanding of their choices.

(2) Political: parties offer ways to coordinate political action between people of similar beliefs/values. It allows them to organize campaigns for issues or candidates and to offer a way to efficiently direct resources ($, time) towards shared ends.

(1) Cognitive: party brands and affiliations offer reliable, accessible information about what candidates stand for and what they’ll do. The latter happens when there is some kind of party discipline as well as branding.

We should start with what political parties promise. It’s complicated, but the key thing is that they promise to make democratic politics “tractable” to busy people. There’s 2 basic dimensions to this tractability:

2/

For what they’re worth, my too-soon-to-say thoughts on the “municipal political party” experiment in Edmonton and Calgary (focusing on Edmonton, b/c that’s what I know best).

🧵- going to a long one. Skip, or buckle in (i don't have a blog to do this in... you're welcome).

You’re in both the best and worst company.