Divided Government and Polarization: Regression-Discontinuity Evidence from US States

Repetto, Luca; Andrés, Maximiliano Sosa

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4158128

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 39 publications

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“…Here, we assume that the forcing variable cannot be manipulated, which means that political parties cannot affect their vote share to locate on one side of the MRD threshold. Like Repetto and Sosa Andrés (2022), we claim that this manipulation is unlikely in the case of close elections, where the outcome is unknown and dependent upon many elections, election day occurrences, and random chance. 16 Regardless, we assess the validity of our research design by examining the density function of our forcing variable, Zst.…”

Section: State-level Analysismentioning

confidence: 83%

Do Political Leaders Impact Economic Freedom at the Local Level? Evidence from Close Elections

Raff,

Swanson,

Zanzalari

2024

Public Finance Review

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This paper examines whether state and local political leaders’ partisan affiliations affect economic freedom at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level. Because political leaders’ partisan affiliations likely correlate with unobserved state- and local-level characteristics that also affect the economic freedom levels of MSAs, we use a regression discontinuity design that leverages close elections as natural experiments to identify a causal effect. Using Stansel (2019)’s index, which aggregates a bundle of policies into a single measure of economic freedom, we find that close Republican majorities in the lower State House increase overall MSA-level economic freedom. This effect is realized through consistent governments (i.e., Republican governor and Republican State House majority) and primarily through changes in labor market policy. At the city level, Republican mayors also increase overall MSA-level economic freedom levels.

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