As noted in the prior post in this series, New York City is a double-blind test of the effect on term limits on democracy. Since 1993 the city has represented by term-limited members of the New York City Council, and by unlimited members of the New York State Legislature. The dominant political party, other election laws, and the voting population are the same in each case. One result, as identified in the prior post in this series, which should be read first, is more contested elections for City Council relative to the New York State legislature, which seldom has any.
In this post I compare selected characteristics of the NYC officeholders in these governing bodies with each other and, in some cases, the population of the city at large. Their race and Hispanic origin. Their sex (male vs. female). Their place of birth. Their age/date of birth/generation. The year when they were first elected to their current position. And their prior job. I don’t usually pay too much attention to New York City’s elected legislative representatives, other than show up every year to vote against the incumbents in my district, so all this information was new to me. Some of it is what I would have expected, but some of it is not.
First, a few notes. A spreadsheet of the findings is here.
It includes a table designed to print on one 8 1/2 by 11 inch page, though I can’t be sure what your spreadsheet program will do with it, a series of charts, and the individual records of the NYC members of the State Senate, State Assembly, and City Council, identified by district number rather than name. Where a seat is vacant due to death or conviction, I used information about the prior officeholder.
Where possible I tried to get the information from the elected official’s official government biography, and yet even making some guesses and taking some liberties (guessing age based on a date given for high school or college graduation, for example) I was seldom able to do that for all characteristics. So seldom, in fact, that I might as well name the officeholders for whom this was possible, as a matter of credit where credit is due. Assemblymembers Weprin, Gottfried, Dinowitz and Benedetto, State Senators Dilan and Diaz, and Council Members Chin, Maisel and Treyer.
In the “Records” worksheet, information from other sources is in bold. I went first to Wikipedia, on the assumption that a public figure would make an effort to make sure their Wikipedia page was accurate, and then took what I could get. (Generally Google didn’t bring up much more on the doings of our elected officials, other than news articles alleging various improprieties, so this wasn’t easy). I offer no warranties: this was a tough job, and I didn’t go back a second time to search for any possible typos and errors.
The hardest characteristic to get was age/year born/generation. I got it for only 46 of 51 City Council members, 52 of 65 State Assembly members, and 22 of 35 State Senators. The percentages shown are based on the smaller number being 100 percent. For some NYC politicians, particularly those who have been in their current offices basically forever, I was unable to find their prior job. Perhaps it is irrelevant. One Assembly Member was elected right out of college in 1970, and has been there ever since, thus having no prior job.
So how do the term-limited and non-term limited politicians compare?
I’m not sure if the categories White (Non-Hispanic), Black (Non-Hispanic), Asian (Non-Hispanic), Native American (non-Hispanic), and Hispanic really represent the cultural diversity of modern America, let alone today’s New York City. But they are enshrined in federal law with regard to, among other things, the fairness of representation under the Voting Rights Act. And, I must admit, these categories are one of two things (the other being sex) that I could guess about people just by looking at their names and pictures.
I would have expected the term-limited legislative body, the City Council, to more closely match today’s population distribution, rather than yesterday’s. With regard to race and Hispanic origin, however, I found no such difference between the City Council and the State Legislature. Among NYC representatives Non-Hispanic Whites and Non-Hispanic Blacks are over-represented, and Hispanics and Asians are under-represented, compared with the overall city population, in all three legislative bodies.
Moreover, because the city is becoming more Hispanic and Asian over time due to immigration, these groups account for a relatively high share of the city’s children and non-citizens. So it is possible that in all three legislative bodies the distribution of the elected representatives approximately matches the city’s voting age citizens, with the exception of the absence of an Asian State Senator. Even with state legislators serving for long periods after having first been elected at a time when the city’s race/Hispanic origin distribution was very different.
Similarly, I might have expected the members of the term-limited City Council to more closely match an expected 50-50 sex ratio. Since all of them have been elected in an era when women have had high participation in the labor force, and higher educational attainment, on average, than men. And that women would be less common in a state legislature whose members could have been around since the 1950s. Particularly since the last two Speakers of the City Council have been women, and the state legislature has had an intern sexual harassment scandal.
Instead I find that females are under-represented in all three legislative bodies, and the one that comes closest to 50-50 is the State Assembly, in which the NYC representatives are 38.5% female. But this is a recent phenomenon – 16 of the 25 NYC members of the Assembly who are female have been elected in 2011 or later. About half of the NYC Assembly members elected in 2011 or later have been female, compared with about a quarter of those elected previously, and the Assembly has had more turnover overall than I might have expected. More on that later.
I couldn’t quite match the place of birth categories of all NYC citizens with those I wanted to use for NYC politicians. Readily available American Community Survey data only includes state of birth, not place, so the orange bar in the chart includes those born anywhere in New York State, not just in New York City.
But suffice it to say many New Yorkers came here from elsewhere. Even including children, obviously more likely to be living where they were born, just 57.8% of current NYC residents were born in New York State. And quite of few of these, like myself and many people I know, were born in other parts of the metro area. Others were born in the city and grew up in the suburbs. Even excluding immigrants who are not citizens (about 1.4 million people), immigrants who are citizens account for about one-quarter of the total NYC population (about 1.75 million). About 950,000 New Yorkers, or 13.3% of the population, were born in other states, and 4.2% were born in Puerto Rico.
In contrast, a large majority of elected officials were born in New York City, with little difference between the term-limited City Council and the non-term limited state legislature. New York City natives account for 74.5% of NYC City Council members, 73.4% of NYC members of the State Assembly, and 72.0% of NYC members of the State Senate. Many proudly note they grew up in the district they now represent. Naturalized immigrants were the second most common group.
I was surprised so few people born or raised elsewhere in the U.S. hold legislative offices in New York City. Consider our recent mayors. Ed Koch, born in the Bronx but raised in Newark NJ before returning to New York City. David Dinkins, born and mostly raised in Trenton NJ. Rudy Giuliani, born in Brooklyn but raised on Long Island before returning to New York. Mike Bloomberg, born in Massachusetts, and Bill DeBlasio, born in Manhattan but raised in Massachusetts.
To understand the significance of this, consider this passage from E. B. White’s famous essay Here is New York.
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter – the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last – the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it its passion.
Those who move here are here because this is exactly the type of place where they want to be. A place where you have all this mass transit, all these public gathering places, so much in walking distance, all these different kinds of people, and so many of them. I recall this quote from Bob Dylan from a PBS history of rock and roll about why he came to New York from Hibbing, Minnesota, and why he was always cagey and deceptive about his origins.
I just happened to be born a long way from the place I was supposed to be, so I came home.
Meanwhile, many of those who were born here were also born a long way from the place where they were supposed to be, in the suburbs or a metro area such as Atlanta or Houston, but chose to stay put. Including many elected officials. And so they try to re-create their little Darien or Cobb County around them, perhaps with the use of parking placards, while thinking the subway and those who ride it are beneath them figuratively as well as literally.
Moreover, some native public officeholders seem more attached to the city that once was – even the collapsing city of the 1970s – than the city that is. Remember that “Welcome Back to Brooklyn” festival that was held for decades in an attempt to get some of the “real” Brooklynites to come back?
And many seem far, far more concerned with the needs of other natives who have moved away and no longer live here – particularly if they live in the suburbs and continue to hold union jobs with the City of New York, or have retired from such jobs to Florida – than the needs of their current neighbors — who are often younger, less well off, and immigrants (in southern Brooklyn) or in-migrants (in northern Brooklyn).
What I am trying to get at with age is not how long someone has lived or how long they have left, but rather the time (to go along with the place) that they grew up in. I observe that most people’s views are formed, and principal concerns are established, in their teens and early 20s, when they first become aware of the wider world and establish an identity separate from their parents.
Sadly, very few people are objective enough to change their minds or shift their concerns based on new information about new conditions and issues present in a new time. Which is why we just had a Presidential election about the social issues of the 1960s, rather than the social, economic, public policy and institutional disadvantages of those came of age later. Those born and raised at different times, as well as in different places, are different people because they in effect where shaped by different worlds.
I would have expected the term-limited City Council to be more representative of the age distribution of all NYC adults than the non-term-limited state legislature, and in this case I was right. New York has become a very young city. Even excluding those 24 and younger, children, students, and those just arrived, nearly half of all city residents (45.7%) are age 44 and younger. The City Council comes closes to this, with 41.3% of its members ages 25 to 44, compared with 32.7% NYC members of the State Assembly and just 13.6% of NYC members of the State Senate. One might consider the State Senate to be a “promotion” office, and thus expect it to skew older, but not the Assembly.
On the other end, just 36.1% if city residents age 25 and older are age 55 and older. This compares with 32.6% of the City Council, 51.9% of NYC members of the State Assembly, and 45.5% of NYC members of the State Senate.
Put another way, the median age of NYC residents age 25 and over (determined by interpolating a frequency distribution as I was taught to do in school) was 44.5 years, compared with 48.0 for the NYC Council, 55.5 for NYC members of the New York State Assembly, and 53.5 for NYC members of the State Senate.
When I think of the New York State legislature, I think of members who serve seemingly forever without somehow ever facing real elections. Men like Sheldon Silver, who “served” for 39 years, Vito Lopez, who “served” for 28 years, Clarence Norman, who “served” for 22 years, John Sampson, who “served” for 18 years, Carl Kruger, who “served” for 17 years, and Jim Brennan, who “served” for 32 years and perhaps even actually served for a few of them, and at least wasn’t sent to jail.
Same with the rest of the state, represented by people like Joe Bruno, who “served” for 31 years, and Dean Skelos, who “served” for 30 years. There are many similarly long-serving elected officials remaining in the State Assembly and State Senate, both from New York City and from the rest of the state.
Obviously term limits makes impossible, and the year first elected to their current office is another significant difference between the term-limited City Council and non-term-limited NYC members of the State Assembly and State Senate. The median year first elected to the New York City Council is, no surprise, 2013. It is 2010 for the State Assembly and 2008 for the State Senate. That is further back than the City Council, but not as far back as I would have expected before beginning this exercise.
It seems there has been far more turnover in the New York State legislature than I would have expected, based on my impressions and what I read in the media. Imagine that 20 years ago, after a state constitutional convention that actually took place, the voters approved something I would be in favor of. A 12-year term limit for all state and local offices in New York State, excluding those representing a limited number of people (say 15,000 or fewer), for whom qualified and interested replacements might therefore not be available.
I would have assumed that if such a provision had been in place, perhaps three-quarters of the current members of the state legislature would not be there today. The actual figures, after a surprising (given the lack of contested elections) amount of turnover, are that just 35.4% of NYC members of the State Assembly and 32.0% of NYC members of the State Senate were elected before 2005. And a surprising (to me) 41.5% of NYC members of the State Assembly and 44.0% of NYC members of the State Senate were elected in 2012 and later.
Perhaps this unexpected turnover explains why NYC members of the NY state legislature are less unrepresentative than I would have expected them to be with regard to race and Hispanic origin. And the NYC members of the State Assembly are less unrepresentative than I would have expected with regard to the sex ratio. Why, given the absence of contested elections, did this turnover happen?
Corruption may be one reason. My view was that NY state legislators keep office until death or conviction, and in recent years there has been plenty of the latter. According to Citizen’s Union…
Since 2000, 33 state legislators have left office due to criminal or ethical issues.
Perhaps the voters cannot, or will not, replace corrupt perpetual incumbents, but as long as Preet Bharara was on the job, there was a chance that someone would.
https://www.vice.com/sv/article/8gdja5/is-new-york-the-most-corrupt-state-in-america-1231
Although that isn’t always possible.
“The real scandal is what’s legal: Pay-to-play has become a pastime in Albany, with contributions turning into actions,” Keahny said. “In three or four of his speeches over the past two years, US Attorney Preet Bharara has said what’s shocking to him is what’s legal.”
Another reason might be, ironically, term limits – for the New York City Council. I had hoped that term-limited members of the NYC Council, if forced to leave their current office, might challenge members of the state legislature in contested elections. There have been relatively few of those, but five of NYC’s 65 representatives (8.3%) in the New York State Assembly previously held another elective office.
What I didn’t plan on was movement in the opposite direction. With term limits creating open City Council seats in years when state legislators don’t have to give up their current seat to run for a new one, 8 of 51 City Council members (15.7%) had another elective office as their prior job.
The City Council members earn a base pay of $148,500, recently increased from $112,500, but members of the State Assembly and State Senate are still stuck at a base pay of $79,500. While virtually every state legislator earns more than their base pay, the additional money required being an inert swabby on Sheldon Silver’s and Dean Skelos’ ships, and voting “yes” without even knowing what you were voting for. (“We all voted yes to rob the future and screw the serfs, so that means we’re all covered, right?”) Plus membership in the state legislature requires lots of travel to Albany, whereas members of the City Council need travel no further than City Hall.
While the state legislature has more theoretical power, therefore, it seems that the politicians consider the City Council to be a step up. And every politician who steps up to the Council creates a vacancy, and turnover, in the state legislature.
The same may be said of Assemblymembers who step up to the State Senate after an opening. Every conviction can therefore create two openings rather than just one. More than half of NYC’s State Senators held a different elective office as their prior job.
To evaluate the impact of City Council term limits on state legislature turnover, one need only compare the characteristics of NY state legislators from New York City with state legislators from the rest of the state, where there are no term limits for local officeholders. But given how long it took me to do what I’ve already done, I’ll leave that piece of work to someone else.
I’m not necessarily disturbed that term limits has led to a shuffling between positions for New York’s politicians, rather than their disappearance. I have no problem with qualified and committed representatives continuing to serve their communities in other offices. The important thing is to get what a political scientist would call “circulation of the elite,” as even the same person might bring a fresh perspective to a new role. And, as a neighbor put it, “every time you shake the tree a few bad apples are going to fall off.”
Other aspects of this tabulation, however, have me wondering if there is any circulation between the politicians and the broader citizenry at all.
If it is the State Assembly, rather than the City Council, that is the entry point for fresh blood, new types of people, and new ideas, it is disturbing that nearly half of NYC’s Assemblymembers were staff members to other politicians prior to being elected to their current positions. Add in those holding other elected offices in their prior jobs and you are up to 55.0%. The term-limited City Council is only somewhat better, with 25.5% of its members having previously been political staff and 41.2% having either been political staff or in other offices. For the State Senate, 72.0% of NYC’s representatives were holders of other offices or political staff.
If you agree with George Washington Plunkitt, who wrote Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, this isn’t a problem. “Politics is just like any other business,” he wrote. “You have to get trained up in it.” I remember when this guy Angel Rodriguez was elected to the City Council from Brooklyn. Gee, I though, here is a guy who is different, an accountant who had his own business and is a Latino. Perhaps he’ll bring a fresh perspective. Instead, he wasn’t savvy enough to know how to do what is shockingly legal, “honest graft” as George Washington Plunkitt would have called it, and ended up arrested and convicted in a ham-handed attempt at corruption via the paper bag of money.
In a way this tabulation isn’t fair to the legislators. I only tabulated their prior job leading to their current elective office. Many had done other things prior to entering politics and becoming “political staff.”
The problem is that for many that prior thing was working for a New York City non-profit – over and above all the elected officials who moved to their current office directly from such a non-profit or union – 17.6% of the City Council members, 5.0% of the NYC members of the State Assembly, and 16.0% of the member of the state legislature.
All the council members and legislators seem to list their organizations as would an ambitious high schooler who joins every club hoping to be elected class president. But the sort of “non-profit” one works for in New York City is different than the non-profits in other parts of the country. And a current politician working for one of those non-profits might not have been “prior to entering politics” after all.
Most people think of “non-profits” as charities people donate to, or volunteer with, but donating and volunteering is less common in NYC and metro New York than in other places, statistical data consistently show. I grabbed some of the latest I could find and put it in this spreadsheet.
When it comes to percent of income donated to charity, New York State is strictly middle of the pack, but it seems likely that Upstate New York is pulling up the statewide average. Of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, New York ranked 38 at 2.6% of income. And when it comes to the percent of the population engaging in voluntary activities, metro New York was third from the bottom out of 51 tabulated, at 17.4%. Last time I had checked, in the early days of Room Eight, metro New York was second from the bottom, only ahead of metro Las Vegas.
Perhaps given all the taxes they pay, more than anyone else, New Yorkers expect the government to do things that people elsewhere do or contribute to as part of voluntary organizations. And in fact one of the things New York’s state and local governments do is contribute to non-profits with tax dollars. In fact there is a whole non-profit ecosystem, with non-profits funded by tax dollars making “donations” to other non-profits, and many non-profits receiving few if any direct contributions from individuals at all.
New York’s budgetary relationship with non-profit sector is longstanding, but it accelerated based on Great Society funding from the federal government, and accelerated further as retroactive pension increases, civil service protections, and bidding rules caused the public services produced by public employees and for-profit contractors to collapse in the 1970s. Particularly with regard to social services, New York turned to independent non-profits to do the work instead – with such contracts in the “other than personal services” category in the chart below.
Over time, however, with dependence on government money many of these non-profits devolved into non-profiteers. Some became, in effect, owned and operated by elected officials, their relatives, their political associates and supporters, and many of the scandals that have led to the arrest and convictions of New York City’s elected officials have involved their financial and political relationships with those “charities.”
The issue of these non-profits, and also with prior public sector employment, is one of “voluntaryness” as I call it. I sadly observe that some people tend to be a little selfish all the time, and all people tend to be a little selfish some of the time, not because they have decided to selfish, but because their perception of what is fair for them to put in and fair for them to take out is so biased.
The only check on this, the only thing that makes society and the economy work at all, is voluntaryness. If other people don’t accept that biased view of what is fair, they can choose another friend to be with. Or a different worker to hire, a different company to work for, a different business to buy goods or services from, etc. As terrible as the surge in divorce has been for children in this country, we can’t get rid of it, because without voluntaryness – the threat of a voluntary relationship ending — people’s most intimate relationships could become unjust over time. Which is why, in Catholic pre-Cana training, we were told to always think of our relationship as 90–10 not 50-50, with us giving 90 and getting back 10. Because based on our biases, that’s the only way to 50-50. Meanwhile, the growth of monopoly and oligopoly power our economy is leading the U.S. down a path of low investment, low innovation and stagnation – because they can.
Even if they do not wish to, however, most people and organizations live in a world of voluntaryness. If you demand too much or don’t do a good enough job, perhaps you’ll be replaced by a different worker, because if your employer charges too much or produces a lousy good or service, perhaps it will go under and you’ll be out of a job.
Those in the political/union class do not live in that voluntary world. They are used to the idea of taking money off the top in taxes people have no choice but to pay, and then negotiating among themselves as to how much, or how little, the serfs deserve in exchange. There are relatively few people who have spent time in the world of voluntaryness among New York City members of the City Council, State Assembly, and State Senate.
In fact there are relatively few such members who ever spent time in a government line agency, directly providing services such as education, transit, health care, police protection, social services, corrections, etc. – although there are some in each of those categories. New York’s elected officials, in particular, do not seem to include the public sector managers who try to get public services delivered under the terms dictated by those elected officials –- who are supported by retired former members of their workforce. In that sense “politics” is a very different business than “government,” and is made up of an entirely different tribe of people. Something everyone who has worked in “government” is well aware of.
Including those in government line agencies, 25.5% of the members of the New York City Council had a prior job in the “other category,” compared with 18.3% of New York City representatives in the State Assembly and 12.0% in the State Senate. A difference, but not as large as I had expected to see. I had expected to see more former lawyers in office, but it seems that most lawyers with political ambitions take a turn as political staff on the way to that goal.
In summary, term limits seem to have helped to increase turnover – directly and indirectly – and make NYC’s elected officials somewhat more representative with regard to age in the City Council and sex in the State Assembly. But they have not changed the fact that the political/union class is a people a part from the rest of us. So it seems the impact has not been as great as I had hoped. Rather, it may be a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
For a normal citizen, dissatisfied with the way things are going and seeking to run for office to push for change as a matter of civic duty, New York State sets the rules to keep you out. As I found when I made my own Don Quixote run against the state legislature.
http://r8ny.com/2008/02/28/are-you-an-american-in-any-meaningful-sense/
On the other hand, reading through the biographies of NYC elected officials, and thinking about the data on metro New York’s low average level of charitable contributions and low percent of the population spending time volunteering, low voter turnout, and the lower percent of New Yorkers who are even willing to mail back their Census forms, and the low percent of people who were interested in talking to me about my issues were when I ran, I begin to question whose fault this is. I didn’t run for office because I wanted to be a politician, but rather out of a sense of frustration and civic obligation. Isn’t that what an American is supposed to do? But how many feel that same obligation, even when City Council term limits provides an opportunity?
I recall listening to one episode of then former-Governor Mario Cuomo’s short-lived radio show, and having him pretty much yell at a caller through the speaker “if you don’t participate in the system it is going to hurt you! The old people are taking everything!” This was in the mid-1990s, the start of massive Generation Greed policies in New York State.
Perhaps the former Governor identified the problem. No wonder the Russians believe that what is left of American democracy would be so easy to mess around with, and defeated the Chinese in the 2016 election.
So perhaps with a new crowd in Albany, there is reason to be slightly hopeful that when the time comes to decide on the characteristics of the diminished future in the wake of the policies of Generation Greed, something that is happening all over the country, it won’t be exclusively a case of (in the words of the Russian Proverb) “the shortage will be divided among the peasants.”
I’d say the odds of that are about the same as the odds of President Donald Trump keeping his promise that after a lifetime of being exclusively concerned with “what’s in it for me” suddenly shifting to a concern with “what’s in it for us,” broadly defined. I guess that as the consequences of 30 years of future selling by Generation Greed continue to arrive, and given that most people now knowledgeable about how the deals and non-decisions of the past affect them, people will grasp onto any hope, however false, that they can find.
Saying the Unsaid in New York 