It's happened to me a couple times while reading Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, the most recent was from this excerpt about a difference between elections in capitalist and socialist countries:

The proposals which were made were of an extremely practical character. For when we set out as citizens to make constructive proposals for our local authority to carry out, the general atmosphere of practicability is very much greater than it can ever possibly be in an election carried out on the basis of party antagonism, where each side will throw exorbitant challenges at the other, hoping to make electoral capital as a result, but having no illusions as to the ultimate practicability of the suggested policy.

To take a concrete example, let us compare the L.C.G. elections of March 1937 with the elections to the Moscow Soviet which took place in 1935, and in which I participated personally. In the former we notice that the Labor Party made great and justifiable play with the increase in housing construction since it came to power. On the other hand, the "moderate" and other candidates tended to center their anti-Labor propaganda on the so-called "extravagance," not of building so many more houses, but in spending in certain isolated cases of more on individual buildings than was necessary. In this way the issue was put to the electorate as: Labor More Houses; Anti-Labor Less Extravagance. The accusation of extravagance might quite well cause people who wanted more houses to vote "anti-Labor," to discover afterwards that the real meaning of less extravagance was to cut down the housing program to what it had been before Labor was elected! And, in elections on a party basis, such a false contrasting of issues is bound to arise continuously, to the utter confusion of electors.

But let us return to the election in Moscow. Here we found no spectacular demands for more houses, since the Moscow Soviet was already building increasing numbers of houses each year. But we did have very strong comments suggesting that the new Soviet should be particularly careful not to build any more large blocks without having a universal store included, that hot water should always be laid on, and that in future the approach to new blocks should be completed together with the houses, instead of having an approach of mud for three months or more after the houses themselves were already inhabited. The question of housing was raised in the Moscow election as well as in the London one, but in the former it took the shape of citizens' definite instructions; in the latter, it was a propaganda weapon which could easily be made a luxurious cloak for a policy that could not command support among the voters at all if it had been fully revealed.

I would like for my concerns to matter politically