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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how in the US, even mayors get tagged as "conservative" or "democratic socialist." I always figured their job was just to keep the city services running.

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That mayor runs a city that has the GDP of multiple nations. The scale is different even if the title is the same.

This is mostly the financial sector generating revenue and shipping/receiving. There's not really a lot of actual production going on since that's what really backs the funny money you referred to as "generating GDP."

Aren’t mayors in all countries politicians? In Denmark all mayors are identified with their party association when talked about in the news.

Reviewing various western democracies it looks like most mayoral candidates run affiliated with a political party. The exception is Canada where mayoral candidates run an independent campaign.

> The exception is Canada where mayoral candidates run an independent campaign.

That's not universal. The City of Vancouver for example has a party system, though the parties are largely not affiliated with provincial or federal parties. There are exceptions there as well though - the Vancouver Greens are affiliated with both the provincial and federal Green parties.

Most of the large city mayoral races in the U.S. are partisan. But I'm not sure how it breaks down by state in the U.S. for small towns.

On the other extreme is India where even university student coucil candidates are associated with national political parties.

Maybe it's the exception rather than the norm, but in Canada, municipal, provincial, and federal parties are generally separate. Montreal, for example, is currently led by Projet Montréal, which has no formal ties to any provincial party. Likewise, the current provincial party, the CAQ, has no formal affiliation with any federal party.

Canada here (Ontario really, probably varies by province) - our mayors and city councilors are politicians but they're explicitly forbidden from running as part of a party. Which I honestly think works so well it should be extended to all levels of politics.

Famously, the US founding fathers warned against the dangers of political parties, only to see them spring up in the US anyways. You really need to design your political system carefully so that there is no incentive to form political parties. I don't know if anyone has ever successfully done this. People should be thinking about it more though.

Specifically, I think a political party happens when two politicians make a bargain that they will each vote for some of the other politician's policies. They don't have to call it "the X party" for it to be a de facto political party.

There are some offices which are designated as nonpartisan here in the US too, I think they are typically offices which don't have a lot of scope for this sort of bargaining. If they did have scope for such bargaining, I wouldn't want to rely on the honor system in the long term. I would want to codify it into law somehow. But how? The best way is probably to reduce the incentive for striking bargains somehow? Again, how? Or maybe bargains are just a distraction, and the real problem lies elsewhere? As I said, people should be thinking more.

The warning about factions wasn't to avoid them. It was that with humans factions are inevitable. The argument was to design a government were the power of factions are minimized or pitted against each other.

In Canada's largest city the mayor is firmly and strongly associated with the NDP. "Chow served as the New Democratic Party member of Parliament for Trinity—Spadina from 2006 to 2014."

And yet that was not the central in her run for mayor at all (I live in that city). She campaigned on policy, not on party branding, like every other candidate did.

in may places eg canada they don't have an explicit party affiliation. obviously they still have a political slant.

Well, define politician.

Some cities have non-partisan mayoral elections. For example, Miami does this under Home Rule charter.

Still, it's often clear who's who. For example, Emilio González prominently displayed a POTUS lapel pin during a debate and bragged about being able to interface with Trump and DeSantis.

This mayor represents more people than many state governors

LaGuardia was a democratic socialist but had to run as a Republican because of Tammany Hall's undemocratic stranglehold on the Democratic party then. NYC has a history of a lot of really shitty, corrupt mayors and political machinery. Let's hope ZM charts a new course.

I believe that in California, the political party that mayoral candidates belong to cannot be printed on the ballot next to their names.

There are lots of small towns in the U.S. where mayors and board members' campaigns are not partisan. That is, they don't run as members of a political party. Just candidates who campaign to "keep the city services running." There are no political parties listed on the ballot for these candidates.

You don't make yourself a name by properly managing garbage trucks and street sweeping. It's not just the US either, Australian local councils went headlong into culture wars long ago.

Counterpoint, I read this interesting article recently contrasting two progressive mayors in the USA, Brandon Johnson (~6% approval rating) and Michelle Wu (66% approval rating)

https://cityjournal.substack.com/p/big-city-progressives-kee...

Is it really? Local approval rating is in no correlation with national name recognition. You don't get your name in the national news by just fixing potholes. I guess you have to do it in order to not get voted out, and some ideological mayors fail to do it.

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