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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Do Elections Encourage Public Actors To Be More Responsive?, Bryan Mccannon, Corey Williams
Do Elections Encourage Public Actors To Be More Responsive?, Bryan Mccannon, Corey Williams
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
In the U.S. many public services are provided by individuals who are selected in local elections. We ask whether elections encourage public actors to be responsive to citizens. We design a novel field experiment where we send an information request to a random sample of prosecutor offices. Whether someone replies to the request is our measurement of responsiveness. We show that offices whose head is up for re-election are more likely to respond. We also show that offices in states that appoint their local prosecutors are substantially less likely to respond than a matched set of offices with elected leadership.
Disamenity Or A Signal Of Competence? The Empirical Political Economy Of Local Road Maintenance, Benjamin Blemings, Margaret Bock
Disamenity Or A Signal Of Competence? The Empirical Political Economy Of Local Road Maintenance, Benjamin Blemings, Margaret Bock
Economics Faculty Working Papers Series
Empirical results find different conclusions than theoretical evidence of how electorates perceive road work. This paper uses a geographically smaller unit of analysis than prior work, political alignment, local election cycles, and difference-in-differences. It finds political distortions in invasive road maintenance timing and rules out maintenance seasonality. Spatial discontinuity plots leveraging ward boundary cutoffs confirm the shift. Results identify new public distortions to road maintenance, local election cycles, which are widespread and frequent. The estimates are used to calculate financial costs of local elections on road maintenance. Local elections have cost medium-large U.S. cities over $185.5 million from 1960- 2020.