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Do voters hold local officials accountable for government performance? Using over a decade of panel data on school district elections and academic achievement in California, I causally identify the effect of test score changes on school board incumbent re-election rates and show that incumbents are more likely to win re-election when test scores improve in their districts-but only in presidential election years. This effect disappears in midterm and off-years, indicating that election timing might facilitate local government accountability.

Why do local governments sometimes hire lobbyists to represent them in other levels of government? I argue that such mobilization efforts depend in part on the policy congruence between localities and their elected delegates in the legislature. I provide evidence consistent with this theory by examining how municipal governments in the United States respond to partisan and ideological mismatches with their state legislators—a common representational challenge. Using almost a decade of original panel data on municipal lobbying in all 50 states, I employ difference-in-differences and a regression discontinuity design to demonstrate that cities are significantly more likely to hire lobbyists when their districts elect non-co-partisan state representatives. The results are broadly consistent with a model of intergovernmental mobilization in which local officials purchase advocacy to compensate for the preference gaps that sometimes emerge in multilevel government.

Does decentralizing policymaking authority to the local level lead to a closer match between public policies and citizen preferences? We study this question in the context of minimum wage laws, a salient and substantively important policy area with significant variation in the degree of local policymaking discretion. Using novel survey data and aggregation methods, we generate esti- mates of minimum wage preferences for all cities across the U.S. and compare these preferences to actual minimum wages. We find that prevailing minimum wages are generally lower than residents prefer, and this conservative bias is most pronounced in states with preemption laws. However, locally controlled minimum wages leapfrog public preferences and are higher than residents want, on average. Finally, we consider how various counterfactual policies might improve representation and conclude that a top-down approach with minimum wages tailored to local conditions would produce the closest match between preferences and policies.

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