Does Constituent Partisanship Predict Municipal Spending and Taxation?

• In Event: Distributive Politics, Inequality, and Representation in Urban Politics

Abstract

Though an earlier literature on urban politics predicted that municipal policies may not reflect the preferences of their constituents, a more recent line of empirical work finds a correlation between residents' ideology and municipal-level spending and taxation, with more conservative cities having lower taxes and expenditures. However, this relationship is mediated by elected officials, who may not always share their citizens' ideological or partisan preferences on spending and taxation. In this paper, we estimate the partisanship of not only every municipality in the US (extending past work to include the vast majority of cities and towns in the US) but also of their elected legislators and chief executive. With these data, we can examine the extent to which elected officials' partisanship mediates the relationship between residents' and policy outcomes. We take advantage of the fact that most cities hold non-partisan elections, which increases the probability of having elected officials whose partisanship does not match their constituents'. We also propose that the correlation between policy outcomes and the partisanship of citizens and officials will diminish in smaller municipalities given the decreased policy scope of small towns.

Authors

• Adam Michael Dynes, Brigham Young University

• Dan Butler, Washington University in St. Louis

• Michelle Torres, UCLA