No abstract

This paper examines the extent to which social pressures can foster greater responsiveness among public officials. I conduct a non-deceptive field experiment on 1400 city executives across all 50 states and measure their level of responsiveness to open records requests. I use two messages to prime social pressure. The first treatment centers on the norm and duty to be responsive to the public’s request for transparency. The second treatment is grounded in the peer effect literature, which suggests that individuals change their behavior in the face of potential social sanctioning and accountability. I find no evidence that mayors are affected by priming the officials’ duty to the public. The mayors who received the peer effects prime were 6–8 percentage points less likely to respond, which suggests a “backfire effect.” This paper contributes to the growing responsiveness literature on the local level and the potential detrimental impact of priming peer effects.

consider studies that examine how campaign forces drive the policies that presidents pursue. From federal grant spending to disaster aid, the specter presidential campaigns persist into governing. Research and Teaching Resources The resources below may be used both to assist researchers new to the subject of presidential campaigns in familiarizing themselves with extant scholarship and learning about important data sources, and to aid instructors in planning courses on presidential campaigns. General Overviews These overviews can serve both as primers for researchers to acquaint themselves with major themes and theories pertaining to presidential campaigns and as primary texts for college-level courses. Boller 2004 includes historical accounts of each presidential election from 1789 to 2000, and discusses how presidential campaigns have changed over time. Along the same lines, Craig and Hill 2011 presents various historical and empirical accounts of the driving factors behind electoral outcomes. Campbell 2008 and Holbrook 1996 provide detailed studies of campaign effects in presidential elections from the minimal and not-so-minimal effects perspectives, respectively (see also Jacobson 2015). Karabell 2000 recasts Truman's 1948 victory over Dewey as the last campaign where candidates represented the full spectrum of ideological diversity before the television changed how political campaigns operated. Sides and Vavreck 2014 applies prevailing theories of presidential campaigns to the 2012 presidential election in real-time. Polsby et al. 2015 and Sides, Shaw, et al. 2015 are styled as traditional textbooks providing students with key factual knowledge and theoretical perspectives important for understanding presidential campaigns. Paul F. Boller. Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush. Oxford University Press, 2004. Presents a historical account of the development of presidential elections throughout American history. Includes a chapter for each presidential election in American history from 1789 to 2000, as well as a postscript discussing major changes in the dynamics of presidential campaigns over time.