When Are Local Incumbents Held Accountable for Government Performance? Evidence from US School Districts

Payson, Julia

doi:10.1111/lsq.12159

Cited by 24 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Much of the recent work on local political participation examines its influence on housing policy (Enos 2016;Hankinson 2018;Trounstine 2018), which is a highly salient issue with direct implications for the local tax revenue used to fund schools as well as the demographic composition of student enrollment. Meanwhile, more specific to education, there has been a steady stream of research looking at participation in school board elections (Henig, Jacobsen, and Reckhow 2019;Kogan, Lavertu, and Peskowitz 2016;Payson 2017) and the larger capacity for school boards to be spaces for democratic governance (Berry and Howell 2007;Flavin and Harney 2017;Hochschild 2005). Yet, few studies focus specifically on school board meetings.…”

Section: Participatory Democracy Deliberation and Public Meeting Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Meeting Style Matter? The Effects of Exposure to Participatory and Deliberative School Board Meetings

Collins

2021

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Would public meetings incite more civic engagement if they were structured in ways that are simply more engaging? I addressed this question by conducting an original survey with an oversample of racial and ethnic minorities and individuals from low-income households. The survey featured a randomized experiment in which each study participant was shown a short clip of an actual school board meeting that was (1) a standard meeting with no public participation, (2) a meeting with public participation, or (3) a meeting with deliberation (public participation followed by a reasoned response from the school board). The experience of viewing the more participatory and deliberative school board meetings led to increased trust in local officials and a stronger willingness to attend school board meetings in the future. This study has significant implications for civic engagement, local politics, and public school governance.

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Section: Participatory Democracy Deliberation and Public Meeting Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Meeting Style Matter? The Effects of Exposure to Participatory and Deliberative School Board Meetings

Collins

2021

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…First, they represent the first-ever empirical evidence that election timing influences the substantive tone and direction of the representation that citizens receive from their elected officials. Although a growing literature on election timing highlights a variety of electoral consequences that arise from holding off-cycle elections (Anzia 2013;de Benedictis-Kessner 2018;Kogan, Lavertu, and Peskowitz 2018;Payson 2017), we are the first to show that election timing matters for political representation and democratic accountability.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

“…In her study of school districts, for example, Anzia (2011) demonstrates that off-cycle elections enable teacher union interest groups to negotiate more generous salaries for their members. Likewise, Payson (2017) shows that compared to on-cycle electorates, off-cycle ones rarely punish incumbent school board members for failing to improve student academic achievement. In other words, off-cycle electorates are systematically less likely to engage in sociotropic retrospective voting.…”

Section: Relevant Literature and Theoretical Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Off-Cycle and Out of Sync: How Election Timing Influences Political Representation

Hartney

Hayes

2021

State Politics Policy Q.

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States exert significant control over many different types of electoral institutions that influence the tone and direction of political representation in American democracy. Yet almost nothing is known about the consequences of the institution that has the greatest singular impact on the turnout and composition of the electorate: election timing. We argue that off-cycle elections will tend to produce governments that are not well-aligned with the political preferences of their median constituent. To empirically test this expectation, we examine the relationship between election timing and mass–elite congruence across local school district governments. Leveraging variation in election timing across districts within the same state, we find that board members are more likely to hold political preferences that are aligned with their constituents when boards are elected in on- versus off-cycle races. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of representation and election timing, suggesting some possible avenues for future research.

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“…Homeowners are also overrepresented in local planning commission meetings and are an important force behind the NIMBY (not in my backyard) impulses that limit new housing development (Hankinson 2018, Einstein et al 2019. Traditional local politics research has also highlighted the importance of other dimensions of local politics, including race and ethnicity (e.g., Kaufmann 2004, Barreto 2007, Hajnal 2009, Trounstine 2018, age (Kogan et al 2018, Anzia 2019), incumbency (Burnett & Kogan 2017, Payson 2017, and the strength of public sector unions (Moe 2011, Anzia & Moe 2015, DiSalvo 2015.…”

Section: The Traditional View: Local Politics Is Distinctivementioning

confidence: 99%

Party and Ideology in American Local Government: An Appraisal

Anzia

2021

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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For decades, research on US local politics emphasized the distinctiveness of local government, but that has begun to change. In recent years, new data on partisanship and ideology have transformed the study of local politics. Much of the ensuing scholarship has concluded that local politics resembles politics in state and national governments: partisan and ideological. I argue that such a conclusion is premature. So far, this newer literature has been insufficiently attentive to the policies US local governments make—and to the fact that they are mostly different from the issues that dominate national politics. Going forward, scholars should prioritize measurement of preferences on these local government issues, develop theories of when and why local political divisions will mirror national partisanship and ideology, and investigate why there are links between some local policies and national partisanship and ideology—and whether those links also exist for core local government issues. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 24 is May 11, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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When Are Local Incumbents Held Accountable for Government Performance? Evidence from US School Districts

Cited by 24 publications

References 36 publications

Does the Meeting Style Matter? The Effects of Exposure to Participatory and Deliberative School Board Meetings

Does the Meeting Style Matter? The Effects of Exposure to Participatory and Deliberative School Board Meetings

Off-Cycle and Out of Sync: How Election Timing Influences Political Representation

Party and Ideology in American Local Government: An Appraisal

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