Mayoral Partisanship and Municipal Fiscal Policy

Abstract

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.

Politics in Forgotten Governments: The Partisan Composition of County Legislatures and County Fiscal Policies

“…4 It is worth noting that these recent findings stand in contrast to earlier work, such as Ferreira and Gyourko (2009) and Gerber and Hopkins (2011), which found largely null e↵ects of the partisanship of government on city fiscal policy. Part of the discrepancy may be due to the time period examined, the size of cities in the data used by di↵erent authors, model specification in Ferreira and Gyourko (2009), and a lack of power in Gerber and Hopkins (2011) (de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw, 2016, p. 1133-1134.…”

“…While there has been an active debate about the e↵ect of municipal o cials' partisanship on local fiscal policies (e.g., Ferreira and Gyourko, 2009;Gerber and Hopkins, 2011), recent work shows that mayoral partisanship has an important e↵ect on policy. Democratic mayors spend more than Republican mayors in medium and large cities, largely through increases in debt (de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw, 2016).…”

“…Previous studies in the urban politics literature have also used the regression discontinuity design to examine the local incumbency advantage (de Benedictis-Kessner, 2018;Ferreira and Gyourko, 2009;Trounstine, 2011), the e↵ects of mayoral partisanship on policy(Ferreira and Gyourko, 2009;Gerber and Hopkins, 2011;de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw, 2016), black mayors on city policies(Hopkins and McCabe, 2012), and partisan selection in school boards on segregation(Macartney and Singleton, 2018).…”

Public Employees as Politicians: Evidence from Close Elections

“…8 For studies on party effects in the U.S. context, see Ferreira and Gyourko (2009), Gerber and Hopkins (2011) and de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw (2016). The effects of the political representation of other non-partisan interests groups, such as women, minorities and occupation groups, on policy outcomes are studied by, for instance, Pande (2003), Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004), Gehlbach, Sonin, and Zhuravskaya (2010), Ferreira and Gyourko (2014), Matter and Stutzer (2015) and Bagues and Campa (2017).…”

Mayor‐Council Form of Government and Policy Responses in Times of Economic Travail

“…Second, their limited number makes their politics unique and important in understanding the role that this specific form of government has on the municipal budgetary process. The mayor‐council form of government has traditionally elected executives, where mayors are seen to have more influence over policy (de Benedictus‐Kessner and Warshaw , 1127). The politics of mayor‐council cities require law makers to be responsive to the policy demands of organized interests and important constituencies.…”