> I don't see how constituency doesn't help here, because now we can hold reps responsible for advocating for better protection,
New York politics (both city and state) are structured in a way that is unbelievably stable (to the status quo) and therefore all-but-impossible to use as a vehicle to effect meaningful change, even to a degree that's possible in other cities and states.
In the case of Eric Garner, yes, it's true that (for example) the judge that ruled against releasing the records surrounding his death (effectively killing any chance at a lawsuit to force change) was up for re-election last year. However, because he has the support of the party machine in his district, the party chose not to run any other candidates against him[0][1]. Party affiliation laws make it all-but-impossible for more than one party to compete in any given district[2], and actually impossible for a third party to compete[3]. As a result, there was no reasonable way he could be unseated, even if literally every other person in the county (had refused to support him.
Changing any of these laws to allow more influence from constituents requires the unanimous approval of the three ranking members of the government, who are also the leaders of the party, which means that they'd essentially have to actively give up their own power. Unsurprisingly, that hasn't happened.
If you want to demonstrate that a democracy causes those in power to listen to their constituents, there is hardly a worse example than New York.
[0] In New York, this is actually a prerogative of the party, believe it or not.
[1] Technically, they ran eight candidates against him, but there were nine positions available, so all were guaranteed victory.
[2] Think of it like Comcast and Time Warner - they "compete" with each other by divvying up territory that they each have a monopoly over. That's how New York state operates - the Republican and Democratic parties each "own" territory and have a gentleman's agreement not to compete too seriously in the others' turf.
[3] The only way third parties can gain influence in New York is to cross-endorse a candidate from one of the major party lines. For example, the Working Families Party usually cross-endorses the Democratic candidate.
> Would publicly funded elections help this problem? I know NYC and some states have Fair Elections implemented in some form
No. New York already publicly funds elections. The problem is that the parties have constructed a system that allows them to bypass voters' wishes entirely[0], and that system is beyond voters' control[1][2].
On top of this, New York voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering is actually way worse than pretty much any other state that you usually hear about in the news. The difference is that it has bipartisan support in New York - since both parties benefit from it equally (at the state level), there isn't any political benefit (to those in power) to drawing attention to it and fixing it.
This system also affects the state courts, so no state court case will ever overturn it. So, short of a federal court case like what happened in North Carolina, there's no way to fix it. And I doubt that it's ever going to happen, because neither left-wing nor right-wing groups actually want to fix it.
Thanks for the explanations. I do actually think that NYS does not have Fair Elections like Maine or Arizona has implemented.
The left in the US doesn't want focus on boring things like election law because it is currently addicted to feeding its project of hearsay-ridden alarmist identity politics, the kind that would inspire someone to for example endorse the violence at Speaker's Corner despite the existing video of the incident. Election law will not appeal to young leftists for reasons obvious to those who have been through the throes of Tumblr and now Twitter politics, where the incentives to control others through social status and guilt creates a fractal prison of power structures, and have managed to grow out of it.
Individual thinkers in the Anglosphere who would rather see progressive activist resources directed toward concrete issues like corruption or housing, and actually talk plainly about the reality of the current directionless Internet dark age on the Left that siphons away these resources into nothingness, like Angela Nagle, Jesse Singal, Freddie DeBoer, and L.H. Fang suffer accusations of holding every sort of oppressive mindset from more popular leftist figures.
New York politics (both city and state) are structured in a way that is unbelievably stable (to the status quo) and therefore all-but-impossible to use as a vehicle to effect meaningful change, even to a degree that's possible in other cities and states.
In the case of Eric Garner, yes, it's true that (for example) the judge that ruled against releasing the records surrounding his death (effectively killing any chance at a lawsuit to force change) was up for re-election last year. However, because he has the support of the party machine in his district, the party chose not to run any other candidates against him[0][1]. Party affiliation laws make it all-but-impossible for more than one party to compete in any given district[2], and actually impossible for a third party to compete[3]. As a result, there was no reasonable way he could be unseated, even if literally every other person in the county (had refused to support him.
Changing any of these laws to allow more influence from constituents requires the unanimous approval of the three ranking members of the government, who are also the leaders of the party, which means that they'd essentially have to actively give up their own power. Unsurprisingly, that hasn't happened.
If you want to demonstrate that a democracy causes those in power to listen to their constituents, there is hardly a worse example than New York.
[0] In New York, this is actually a prerogative of the party, believe it or not.
[1] Technically, they ran eight candidates against him, but there were nine positions available, so all were guaranteed victory.
[2] Think of it like Comcast and Time Warner - they "compete" with each other by divvying up territory that they each have a monopoly over. That's how New York state operates - the Republican and Democratic parties each "own" territory and have a gentleman's agreement not to compete too seriously in the others' turf.
[3] The only way third parties can gain influence in New York is to cross-endorse a candidate from one of the major party lines. For example, the Working Families Party usually cross-endorses the Democratic candidate.