In Britain, the government has just introduced Police and Crime Commissioners, who are elected to provide civilian oversight of the local police force - like an American sheriff. Turnout for these elections was very low - just 15%, which has led to the media describing the PCCs as a failure.
I am not so sure. Voter ignorance has been repeatedly demonstrated, but it has also been shown that voters in low-turnout elections are much higher information. This is intuitively plausible - the person who can be bothered to vote in the local council election is much more politically engaged than the person who only votes in the general election. I'm not aware of any study about voter ignorance in the PCC elections, but I don't doubt that (1) the electorate is much better-informed than members of the general public and (2) much more likely to be civically virtuous - i.e. hard-working, homeowners, not divorced, not on benefits, etc. Therefore it seems to me that a low turnout is a good thing, and at first I thought that Britain should have other unglamorous elected positions which would also take advantage of this better electorate to improve standards of governance.
However, I am also aware that something like this exists in America, and my understanding is that these municipal posts are often quite corrupt and elections frequently uncontested, so my naive theory is wrong. Possible explanations:
The better electorate is more than cancelled out by the obscurity of the election - i.e. the typical clueless moderate nevertheless knows much more about Barack Obama than the high-information voter does about his local sanitation commissioner.
Lack of a proper demos (i.e. people vote for their preferred party's candidate for a local election to send a national message).
The stories I hear are limited to the big cities, and things are much better in suburbs and the countryside.
The UK would get a good short-term effect from this move, but in the long-term it would move to a new equilibrium where corrupt voters would see how much sense it made for them to vote for sanitation commissioner.
Other?
Your thoughts would be particularly appreciated if there are unglamorous low-level elections where you live.
5-Among those informed few who vote in smaller elections, especially local ones, are those who stand to benefit materially from one outcome or another. This could be a large enough number to sway otherwise similarly matched candidates, such that whoever wins will owe favors to one group or another.
Around here, school bonds almost never lose, and school board members are often very friendly with school unions.
I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:
As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.