Fiscal Consequences of Electoral Institutions

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. AbstractThere are more than 500,000 elected local government officials in the United States. The most electorally dense county has more than 20 times the average number of elected officials per capita. This paper offers the first systematic investigation of the link between electoral density and fiscal outcomes. Electoral density presents a tradeoff between accountability and monitoring costs. Increasing the number of specialized elected offices promotes issue unbundling, reducing slack between citizen preferences and government policy; but the costs of monitoring a larger number of officials may offset these benefits, producing greater latitude for politicians to pursue their own goals at the expense of citizen interests. We predict diminishing returns to electoral density and a U-shaped relationship between the number of elected local officials and government fidelity to citizen preferences. We find that public sector size decreases with electoral density up to a point, beyond which budgets grow as more officials are added.

City government structure: are some institutions undersupplied?

“…We explore the effect of elected offices in a related manner. In Berry and Gersen's (2009) work, "each office is only counted once, regardless of the number of officeholders." We do count and rely upon the actual number of office holders in the council size (as opposed to using averages).…”

How electoral incentives shape performance measurement efforts

“…There are practical issues that highlight the importance of understanding the ways in which the management decisions of elected administrators differ from those of their non‐elected counterparts. First, research indicates that elected officials are more responsive to citizens’ preferences than their non‐elected counterparts, at least until monitoring costs become too great, and are more likely to look for opportunities to credit claim (see Clingermayer and Feiock ; Besley and Coate ; Berry and Gersen ; Burden et al ; Miller ). Likewise, this research provides evidence that electoral considerations shape elected administrators’ management decisions concerning performance issues.…”

A sizeable effect? Municipal council size and the cost of local government in Canada

“…In this hypothesis, a higher number of electoral districts reduces the cost burden of public works projects for each district, thereby facilitating the approval of larger projects and contributing to greater total expenditures. While numerous studies find a positive relation between council size and total expenditures (Baqir ; Bradbury and Stephenson ; Egger and Koethenbuerger ; Hirota and Yunoue ), others are more nuanced (MacDonald ; Berry and Gersen ; Drew and Dollery ), while the inverse relation is identified in one study (Pettersson‐Lidbom ). Although the law of 1/n has been transposed to various contexts, it has not been applied to Canadian municipalities.…”

“…Primo and Snyder () argue that casting a wider net is necessary in order to decipher findings among the noise created by variations in the types of services produced and cost sharing arrangements between governments. Berry and Gersen (), for their part, identify a U shaped relation; adding elected officials in a jurisdiction with few officials reduces the tax burden and expenditures while adding elected officials in a jurisdiction that already has many leads to increases in both. MacDonald () argues that the link between council size and scale of expenditures is usually found using cross section estimations, which may be subject to omitted variable bias.…”