Does the City Get the Credit? RCT Evidence from Philadelphia’s Zero Fare Program

• In Event: State Responsiveness to Citizen Engagement: Effectiveness of Information, Participation, and Social Media

Abstract

The policy feedback literature has long argued that benefit receipt shapes how citizens evaluate government (Pierson 1993; Soss 1999; Mettler and Soss 2004). More recent work on administrative burden extends this claim, showing that the costs recipients incur while seeking and claiming benefits themselves teach people lessons about state competence and trustworthiness (Herd and Moynihan 2018; Bell et al. 2024). However, less clear is when a person receives a benefit, whether the resulting trust accrues to the government as an abstract, often diffused, entity, or to the specific level of government that administered the program? The question matters in politico-administrative systems where delivery is distributed across federal, state and local actors (Arceneaux 2006), and is particularly important as responsibility for redistributive policy shifts toward sub-national governments (Agrawal et al. 2024).
Evidence on how recipients attribute program benefits to particular actors is mostly observational (Campbell 2012), and pre-registered experimental evidence on level-specific trust effects, to our knowledge, does not exist outside of developing contexts (Evans et al. 2019). We provide empirical evidence for this question using a pre-registered randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Philadelphia’s Zero Fare program, a two-year pilot that provided fully subsidized transit passes to low-income city residents. 45,000 eligible Philadelphians aged 18 to 64 were identified from administrative data, with 22,500 were randomly assigned to treatment and 22,500 to control conditions. Importantly, Zero Fare automatically enrolled recipients: residents in the treatment condition received a pre-activated, automatically reloaded transit card in the mail without any action needed to claim the benefit. Uptake was relatively high (approximately 65%). Trust in the Philadelphia city government was pre-registered as a confirmatory, secondary outcome across three survey waves. Our primary specification is an intent-to-treat OLS model with LASSO-selected covariates and individual-clustered standard errors.
Assignment to Zero Fare increases trust in city government by 2.36 percentage points (p<0.01), an 11 percent increase relative to the control endline mean of 21.6 percent. The estimate is robust to pre-registered endline reweighting and survives Benjamini-Hochberg correction for multiple testing. The effect is concentrated at the endline wave (+3.69pp; p<0.01). Trust in the federal government shows a positive but less precisely estimated coefficient that does not meet the p<0.05 threshold in either specification.
These findings offer evidence that a well-designed city-level benefit can generate measurable gains in trust toward the government that delivered it, while leaving trust in other levels of government unchanged. The level-specific pattern suggests that citizens attribute their experience to the delivering entity, and not to government in the abstract. In ongoing work, we are leveraging within-survey variation in transit use to differentiate which features of delivery, such as low burden delivery or value of benefits, are most important for increasing trust. If trust increases with use, benefit value is a key driver. But if the effect is found across the distribution of transit usage, burden reduction is the more plausible driver. Together these results empirically inform the theoretical claim that how and by whom benefits are delivered shapes citizen trust in government.

Author

• Daniel Banko-Ferran, Haverford College
  Presenting Author