Title:      When Mayors Matter: Estimating the Impact of Mayoral
Partisanship on City Policy

Authors:    Elisabeth Gerber, Daniel Hopkins

Entrydate:  2009-09-18 07:59:20

Keywords:   Regression discontinuity design; partisanship; urban
fiscal policy

Abstract:   U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set
policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors�
partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral
discretion--and thus partisanship�s influence--will be
more pronounced in policy areas where there is the less shared
authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test
this hypothesis, we create a novel data set combining U.S.
mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with urban fiscal
data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities
that elect a Democratic mayor spend less on public safety, a
policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise
similar cities that elect a Republican or Independent. We find
no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas
that are characterized by significant overlapping authority.
These results have important implications for political
accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full
range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=938

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