After It’s Too Late: Estimating the Policy Impacts of Black Mayors in U.S. Cities

Hopkins, Daniel J.; McCabe, Katherine T.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1632390

Cited by 29 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 78 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We take advantage of the fact that the likelihood that a party forms government and passes the budget on its own changes sharply when the most voted party wins 50% + 1 of the total seats. This method recently has been applied successfully to study the impact of different electoral and government variables on spending (see, for instance, PetterssonLidbom 2008PetterssonLidbom , 2012Leigh 2008;Hopkins and McCabe 2012;Gagliarducci et al 2011). The advantage of our approach is that when certain conditions are met, the accuracy of estimates of the effects of interest are similar to those of experimental studies (Green et al 2009).…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Since Lee (2008), the close-elections approach has been applied successfully in studying the causal effects on policies and public spending of various explanatory variables, such as the ideology of the incumbent party (Pettersson-Lidbom 2008;Leigh 2008;Folke 2014;Curto-Grau et al 2012), the ethnicity of the head of government (Hopkins and McCabe 2012), female quotas (Casas-Arce and Saiz 2014), electoral rules (Gagliarducci et al 2011), the size of the legislature (Pettersson-Lidbom 2012), and the wage paid to politicians (Gagliarducci and Nannicini 2013). However, despite the key role that government fragmentation plays in much of the theoretical literature, very little of the existing research develops adequate identification strategies for analyzing the question at hand empirically.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Government fragmentation and fiscal deficits: a regression discontinuity approach

Artés

Jurado

2018

Public Choice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Some electoral systems favor strong single-party majority governments, while others the formation of coalitions. Having one or the other is likely to affect economic outcomes in ways that are unintended when the electoral rules are approved. In this paper, we show that government fragmentation has large fiscal implications. We also provide results that have a causal interpretation. Using a panel of Spanish municipalities, along with a close-elections regression discontinuity design, we find that single-party majorities run budgets with a 1.5% point larger primary surplus than that of coalitions. In addition, we show that lower deficits are driven mainly by single-party majority governments' capacity to raise more revenues. These findings are robust to several model specifications.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 93%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Government fragmentation and fiscal deficits: a regression discontinuity approach

Artés

Jurado

2018

Public Choice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Moreover, a variety of studies show that city policies are responsive to the views of their citizens. Percival, Johnson, and Neiman (2009) shows an association between county-level ideology and 2 Using a similar dataset and research design, Hopkins and McCabe (2012) find that electing a black mayor instead of a white one leads cities to devote less resources to police protection. 3 They only have 134 observations in their main analysis.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…16 The fact that this is a "local" average treatment effect indicates that we are not estimating the overall impact of electing a Democrat, but instead the impact of a razor-tight Democratic victory (Gerber and Hopkins, 2011). 17 Previous studies in the urban politics literature have also used the regression discontinuity design to examine the local incumbency advantage (Ferreira and Gyourko, 2009;Trounstine, 2011), the effect of black mayors on city policy outcomes (Hopkins and McCabe, 2012), and the effect of female mayors on policy outcomes (Ferreira and Gyourko, 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mayoral Partisanship and Municipal Fiscal Policy

Benedictis-Kessner

Warshaw

2016

The Journal of Politics

157

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…Nor are these foundational studies historically context‐bound. Noting that early research on the impact of black mayors focuses on the limited number of cities having them prior to the mid‐1980s and that the first wave of big‐city black mayors differed from more contemporary black mayors, Hopkins and McCabe (:667) acknowledge the possibility that the distinctive policy impact of black mayors may have declined over time. Their analysis of black mayors taking office over a broader span of time (1972–2005) finds that in most areas, the spending priorities and policies of black mayors are indistinguishable from those of white mayors.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Minority Representation and Order Maintenance Policing: Toward a Contingent View

Sharp

2014

Social Science Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective. This article's aim is to test the impact of black political and bureaucratic representation on the rate at which blacks are arrested for order maintenance violations in U.S. cities. Methods. Using data from the Law Enforcement Management and Administration Survey, the Census Bureau, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, for all U.S. cities over 100,000 population, the article first documents the continuing influence of black elected officials in promoting black representation on police forces. After establishing the appropriateness of order maintenance policing as a follow-up focus, the article then tests hypotheses that link variation in the rate of black order maintenance arrests to black political and bureaucratic representation, contingent upon form of government. Results. Black political representation does constrain black order maintenance arrests, while black representation on the police force does not. Conclusion. Even with a more racially representative police force in place, black political representation is what matters in constraining controversial patterns of police practice.There is a relatively strong consensus that when it comes to policing, the representation of African Americans in elected office matters-at least for some aspects of policing. Early research on this was initiated decades ago by scholars attentive to the emergence of black mayors in America-black mayors with agendas shaped by the problematic relationship between police and the black community in many cities. Scholars found that the presence of a black mayor (Saltzstein, 1989) or the "political incorporation" of blacks via election of a black mayor and inclusion of black members on a city council's dominant coalition (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb, 1984) positively affected black employment on the police force; black representation in local political office was also found to be a very important predictor of the adoption of civilian review boards with meaningful powers to investigate citizen complaints (Saltzstein, 1989;Browning, Marshall, and Tabb, 1984).Nor are these foundational studies historically context-bound. Noting that early research on the impact of black mayors focuses on the limited number of cities having them prior to the mid-1980s and that the first wave of big-city *

show abstract

After It’s Too Late: Estimating the Policy Impacts of Black Mayors in U.S. Cities

Cited by 29 publications

References 78 publications

Government fragmentation and fiscal deficits: a regression discontinuity approach

Government fragmentation and fiscal deficits: a regression discontinuity approach

Mayoral Partisanship and Municipal Fiscal Policy

Minority Representation and Order Maintenance Policing: Toward a Contingent View

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About