Lessons from YIMBY
I think there's some interesting lessons to be learned from the Bay Area's YIMBY/pro-housing movement (https://yimbyaction.org/), which I've hung around with a bit over the last few years. One big one is that it shows how some kinds of politics are relatively "open". Now, YIMBYism is kind of unusual, because:
- it's an issue that has large, direct impacts on people's lives, unlike (say) wasteful or corrupt social programs, where costs are diluted among all taxpayers
- it's an issue that's been almost entirely ignored, until quite recently
- there's a pretty clear academic consensus on what the problem is, and on what the solution is
- the problem is concentrated among liberal, coastal city-dwellers
So you might not see the same results in, say, the gun rights or pro-choice movements. But still, I think it's a useful data point.
I think everyone's encountered cultures that were "closed" or "cliquish" (not sure if there's a canonical name for this), like what CS Lewis describes in The Inner Ring (http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php). Basically, such a culture really emphasizes social status, who is "in" and who's "out", and "outsiders" are seen as inferior; becoming an "insider" relies mostly on subtle "codes", how people talk, what their opinions are, what they wear, which words they use, etc.; and these "codes" aren't explained, or are deliberately kept hidden. As seen on TV, politics is very much like this. People have similar backgrounds, they went to the same schools, they dress the same, they give the same speeches.
But interestingly, I think the YIMBY groups haven't really experienced this. There weren't any hidden walls or invisible fences to keep the hoi polloi out. There was opposition to YIMBY policies, of course - fierce and widespread opposition - but I never got the sense of politicians as "insiders" who would uniformly close ranks against "outsiders". People who get interested can pretty much just start showing up to events and meet decision makers, both those with formal government positions and influencers like journalists and organizers. And some well-known YIMBY activists are... I'll say "eccentric", but considering how new the movement is, there's been a lot of success just from being energetic and extroverted. There's been ups and downs, of course, but California is clearly moving towards infill development and away from sprawl and exclusionary zoning, despite the many groups actively pushing the other way.
That was what many people predicted about Trump, much to their chagrin, although to be fair Trumpism is more about Trump as an individual than a given policy platform...
I wouldn't call Macron a geek, but he had a lot of success this last month in recruiting hundreds of outsiders to run for the French parliament and sweeping out old party establishments: https://www.vox.com/world/2017/6/18/15821552/macrons-en-marche-sweeps-french-parliament
It would be straightforward-ish (if you had a bunch of time to research) to compile a list of pro-housing victories, but each victory is then the result of dozens or hundreds of individual actions, and it's usually unclear which action contributed by how much. Eg., the election of Scott Wiener to the State Senate was a huge win. But 200,000 people voted for Scott Wiener. How many of those votes were influenced by YIMBY campaigning? I'm not sure we'll never really know. All I know is that the YIMBYs are much larger and better organized than they were five years ago, and at the same time, there is a lot more pro-housing legislation than there was five years ago.