Mayors As Managers: Assessing the Role of Political Leaders in the U.S.

• In Event: Service Provision in the City: Successes and Failures

Abstract

While the notion that competence among political leaders is an important and desirable trait is universally shared, there is little rigorous empirical evidence backing this belief. An important reason for why the impact of politicians’ competence on policies has remained largely unexplored is the lack of a satisfactory measure of competence. We develop an original survey methodology to assess the competence of U.S. mayors as administrators of the local government and study if it translates into better policymaking. The survey methodology is inspired by Bloom and Van Reenen (2007)’s study of managerial competence in firms and assesses mayors’ managerial competence along four dimensions: target setting, performance monitoring, operations and incentives. The methodological innovation relies on the fact that the survey uses a double-blind survey technique to ensure unbiasedness in responses. We study if more competent politicians make a more efficient use of public funds and ultimately provide better services to their citizens. To get causal traction on this question we leverage the staggered nature of U.S. mayoral elections in a diff-in-diff design.

Authors

• Maria Carreri, Northwestern University

• Julia Payson, New York University