Does it matter for municipal fiscal policies which party controls the mayorship in municipal government? The bulk of the existing evidence says no. But there are a variety of theoretical reasons to believe that mayoral partisanship should affect municipal policy outcomes. In this paper, we examine this question using data on nearly 1000 elections in medium and large cities over the past 60 years. In contrast to previous work, we find that mayoral partisanship has a significant impact on the size of municipal government. Overall, Democratic mayors spend more than Republican mayors. The bulk of this additional spending comes on roads, housing, libraries, and interest. We find a modest impact of mayoral partisanship on city tax levels. However, Democratic mayors issue substantially more debt than Republican ones. They also spend much more to service interest on debt. Our findings show that mayoral partisanship matters for city policy. Moreover, our findings add to a growing literature indicating that the constraints imposed on city policymaking do not prevent public opinion and elections from having a meaningful impact on municipal policy.

Does media choice cause polarization, or merely reflect it? We investigate a critical aspect of this puzzle: How partisan media contribute to attitude polarization among different groups of media consumers. We implement a new experimental design, called the Preference-Incorporating Choice and Assignment (PICA) design, that incorporates both free choice and forced exposure. We estimate jointly the degree of polarization caused by selective exposure and the persuasive effect of partisan media. Our design also enables us to conduct sensitivity analyses accounting for discrepancies between stated preferences and actual choice, a potential source of bias ignored in previous studies using similar designs. We find that partisan media can polarize both its regular consumers and inadvertent audiences who would otherwise not consume it, but ideologically opposing media potentially also can ameliorate the existing polarization between consumers. Taken together, these results deepen our understanding of when and how media polarize individuals.

County governments are a crucial component of the fabric of American democracy. Yet there has been almost no previous research on the policy e↵ects of the partisan composition of county governments. Most counties in the United States have small legislatures, usually called commissions or councils, that set their budgets and other policies. In this study, we examine whether counties with Democratic legislators spend more than counties with Republican ones. We assemble an original dataset of 10,708 elections in approximately 298 medium and large counties over the past 25 years. Based on a regression discontinuity design, we find that electing a Democratic legislator rather than a Republican one leads the average county to increase spending by about 5%. Overall, our findings contribute to a growing literature on the policy consequences of partisan control of state and local government. They show that the partisan selection of county legislators has important policy e↵ects in county governments.

Retrospective voting is a crucial component of democratic accountability. A large literature on retrospective voting in the United States finds that the president’s party is rewarded in presidential elections for strong economic performance and punished for weak performance. By contrast, there is no clear consensus about whether politicians are held accountable for the local economy at other levels of government, nor how voters react to the economy in a complex system of multilevel responsibility. In this study, we use administrative data on county-level economic conditions from 1969 to 2018 and election results across multiple levels of government to examine the effect of the local economy on elections for local, state, and federal offices in the United States. We find that the president’s party is held accountable for economic performance across nearly all levels of government. We also find that incumbents are held accountable for the economy in U.S. House and gubernatorial elections. Our findings have broad implications for literatures on representation, accountability, and elections.

Previous research demonstrates that manipulating vision influences balance. Here, we question whether manipulating balance can influence vision and how it may influence vision, specifically the perception of width. In Experiment 1, participants estimated the width of beams while balanced and unbalanced. When unbalanced, participants judged the widths to be smaller. One possible explanation is that unbalanced participants did not view the stimulus as long as when balanced because they were focused on remaining balanced. In Experiment 2, we tested this notion by limiting viewing time. Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 but viewing time had no effect on width judgments. In Experiment 3, participants’ level of arousal was manipulated because the balancing task likely produced arousal. While jogging, participants judged the beams to be smaller. In Experiment 4, participants completed another arousing task (counting backward by 7s) that did not involve movement. Again, participants judged the beams to be smaller when aroused. Experiment 5a raised participants’ level of arousal before estimating the board widths (to control for potential dual-task effects) and found that heightened arousal still influenced perceived width of the boards. Collectively, heightened levels of arousal, caused by multiple manipulations (including balance), influenced perceived width.