The dynamics that give rise to unethical government
After the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams, journalists were drawn to historical analogies. Mayor “Beau” Jimmy Walker, who loved nightclubs nearly as much as Adams, was forced from office and was almost indicted, before fleeing the country with a Ziegfeld girl. Mayor William O’Dwyer had overseen a Police Department that was heavily involved with an illegal gambling ring, leading the mayor to accept an ambassadorship and flee the city. And of course, “Elegant” A. Oakley Hall was indicted as part of the massive corruption scandal that brought down the city’s then-political leader, “Boss” William Tweed. A headline in the Times put it succinctly: “The Greatest City in the World, Some Really Lousy Mayors.”
These historical analogies, interesting as they were, lead to two big sets of questions.
The Adams administration’s apparent grifts are certainly concerning, despite the Trump administration’s decision to drop the charges against the Mayor. But do they really belong in this list of epic scandals?. After all, the current administration’s numerous alleged failings — from pushing the Fire Department to sign off on some permits for a Turkish embassy in exchange for illegal campaign donations and flight upgrades to the police commissioner’s twin brother asking for bribes from outer-borough nightclubs in return for special treatment — are almost amazingly small-time.
The second set of questions is more fundamental. Is New York particularly at risk of having corrupt elected officials? What is it about big-city government — here or in other big cities like Chicago — that makes it synonymous with public corruption?
Public corruption has been given many definitions over the years, but I’ve argued that it is best understood as a particular species of the general problem of governmental nonresponsiveness. While there are plenty of other reasons to worry about graft, favoritism and a culture of rule-breaking, the most important one is that it results in government spending and regulations that are not responsive to citizens’ concerns or wants. From the perspective of the average Joe, a corrupt politician and a lazy one are pretty similar. They tax you and tell you what you can do, but do so badly because they are focused on something other than providing good governance.
Exit, voice and New York City
But why would big-city politicians be particularly corrupt or unresponsive? There are two main reasons (plus one that helps explain why there is so much corruption up in Albany). The answers lie in the classic work of Albert Hirschman, who argued that there are two major ways citizens influence government: “exit” and “voice.” Both are lacking in contemporary New York City.
Exit, in this context, is the threat that people will leave a jurisdiction, punishing governments for being unresponsive to their concerns. Economists have long argued that the threat of exit is the sharpest constraint on local policymaking; politicians can’t make people too angry, lest they pack up their things and go to the suburbs or another city (along with their tax dollars). But, as Jan Brueckner and David Neumark have found, exit is less of a constraint for cities that govern really attractive assets, like stretches of beautiful coastline or other natural amenities. Who would leave Aspen or Calistoga, Calif., in Napa Valley, just because its government didn’t provide services efficiently?
New York City has the nation’s strongest “agglomeration economies,” or the economic benefits of density. Due to a lot of luck and some early good decisions — its deep port, the trading culture created by the Dutch, the Erie Canal and the creation of the street grid, etc. — Gotham became the nation’s trade and financial center. Since then, the City has done many things that seemed intended to drive business away, from high-income taxes to the old stock transfer tax to our current failures to police disorder on the street. But because it is home to the world’s financial and business elite and has incomparable cultural and social attractions, exit is less of a threat. Not a nonexistent one — people and businesses leave the city all the time due to frustrations with the City’s policy choices — but less of one.
Exit pressures do less to constrain officials in New York City because the people and businesses of New York are hard to leave, no matter how bad governance gets. (Look at how expensive real estate is here — it is not because people are voting with their feet for inefficient spending on rail expansions or street garbage!) So in that headline, the Times almost got it right — but to be entirely accurate, it should have read, “The World’s Greatest City. So It Has Some Really Lousy Mayors.”
The second reason New York City suffers from corruption is a lack of partisan competition. In the absence of exit, citizens will only get what they want through politics, or what Hirschman calls “voice.” But most voters’ voices in New York are decidedly muted. Political scientists like Dan Hopkins, Steve Rogers and Jake Grumbach have found that, across the country, almost all people vote the same way for city council and state legislature as they do for president. (This may be less true in small cities, where at least some voters have strong incentives to pay attention.)
In cities where one party dominates, and in an era of nationalized politics, general elections do little to constrain politicians. If an incumbent is in the majority party, he or she is likely to win no matter what they do.
New York City has long been a one-party city at levels below the mayoralty. In recent years, even the mayor’s race has been all about the Democratic primary. So what, you might ask? We have competitive primaries, don’t we?
That’s insufficient. In primaries, voters don’t have great tools for telling candidates apart. There are no “on-ballot heuristics” that serve to inform low-information voters whether a candidate is a moderate or a radical, the way Democratic or Republican Party endorsements tell voters things about candidates in national general elections. Voters just don’t know very much about the candidates.
And turnout is remarkably low. Fewer than an eighth of New Yorkers participated in the 2021 Democratic primary that decided who would be mayor. The result is that, while interest groups and small numbers of highly informed “super-prime” voters pay attention and dominate these elections, the mass public is mostly not paying attention. (And the mayor’s race is much, much better on this score than other local elections, to which voters pay almost no attention.) Local elections just don’t do a lot to make politicians listen to ordinary voters in a city like New York.
The absence of genuine competition causes corruption in two ways. First, there is less direct electoral punishment for nonresponsiveness, as voters are less engaged. Second, getting things done in legislatures that lack strong partisan competition often requires complex dealmaking. While a powerful speaker leading an ideological party can whip her troops into line in a competitive legislature, in one-party legislatures, “distributive politics” norms dominate. Every official, responsive to the needs of the small number of primary voters in her district, needs to get some pork or some special treatment to get things through. While this can take the form of inefficient “member items” or “aldermanic privilege” with respect to land-use decisions, it can also take the form of petty corruption.
Lack of media scrutiny
One other source of corruption is the decline of local media. Newspapers provide politicians with incentives to do popular things and punishments for being corrupt. This may help explain why Albany is so corrupt. Felix Campante and Quoc Anh-Do found that, when state capitals are far away from their state’s biggest newspaper, state officials are much more corrupt, as there are fewer people watching what they do.
The decline of local media in recent decades has meant there is less responsive government in cities around the country. When a newspaper closes, the local governments it covers face higher borrowing costs, as investors think the governments will be more wasteful.
While New York City still has local papers and many talented journalists, providing it with a type of protection other cities lack, the number of reporters covering local politics has declined substantially. The New York Times’ recent (awful) decision not to endorse in local elections highlights how little the big papers as institutions care about local government.
So why might there be a particular risk of corruption in the New York City government? It has all the ingredients: a sticky local population, uncompetitive and unresponsive elections, and declining local media. When you throw in the fact that the city government spends a lot of money, the real question may be why we don’t see even more corruption.
Can integrity fight back?
So if corruption is always going to be a risk in New York, what should the public do about it? We wouldn’t want to be the kind of city people want to leave, so encouraging exit should be out. We could take steps to make our elections more competitive; that would mean moving our ranked choice voting system, which now only applies to the primaries, to the general election, and having elections during a presidential year to increase turnout. And we could make our local media better, through supporting institutions like — ahem ahem — Vital City (or, you know, The City or City & State or New York Focus or Politico or other established outlets…).
Even so, some corruption is probably inevitable. The question is how harmful it will be. To me, the most notable thing about Adams’ alleged corruption is that it was so lame. Shakedowns over noise violations? Expediting building code approvals? It’s not that bad, but it is a bit sad.
The biggest problem with Adams’ alleged corruption — even without the prospect of a criminal trial looming over an election year — is that it is of a type with broader problems with his administration. He could have been a great mayor. He came into office with the type of political coalition necessary to be a transformative figure, one who could have marshaled the combined power of big labor and big business to overcome the policy drift that has slowed growth in the city, made the government wildly inefficient and permitted increasing disorder. To be fair, he’s made some progress on this front. Both his City of Yes zoning reforms, pushed by his excellent city planning commissioner, Dan Garodnick, and the terrific former Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s garbage changes are substantial achievements for which Adams deserves real credit.
But the mayor could have achieved much more. Instead, his administration has been a bit aimless, refusing to make hard choices on the budget and not having a sufficiently fast metabolism to push for big enough zoning and legislative changes to address the many challenges the city faces. (If his proposed City Charter reform, led by Rich Buery, radically changes land-use practice, that would be something else entirely.)
His alleged corruption reflects these relatively minor ambitions. He and members of his inner circle aren’t accused of making payoffs to get something big done. Instead, they’ve just been accused of penny-ante fraud. So far, Mayor Adams has mostly wasted the potential of his administration. Unless he turns it around, that — not the indictments and investigations — will be remembered as the real scandal.