Do Elections Improve Constituency Responsiveness? Evidence from US Cities

Abstract

Do elections motivate incumbent politicians to serve their voters? In this paper, we use millions of service requests placed by residents in US cities to measure constituency responsiveness. We then test whether an unusual policy change in New York City, which enabled city councilors to run for three rather than two terms in office, improved constituency responsiveness in previously term-limited councilors’ districts. Using difference-in-differences, we find robust evidence for this. Taking advantage of differential timing of local election races in New York City and San Francisco, we also find late-term improvements to responsiveness in districts represented by reelection-seeking incumbents. Elections improve municipal services, but also create cycles in constituency responsiveness. These findings have implications for theories of representative democracy.

Elections and Policy Responsiveness: Evidence from Environmental Voting in the U.S. Congress

“…Citizens tend to hold more pro‐environmental preferences than organized interest groups, and the election time is when citizens receive relevant information about legislators' behavior. We contribute to the literature on the link between elections and accountability (e.g., Achen & Bartels, ; Arnold, ; Christensen & Ejdemyr, ; Erikson, ; Fearon, ; Ferejohn, ; List & Sturm, ; Mayhew, ) by showing that when the gap between public preferences and legislators' choices originates from interest group pressure, the salience of politics at election time can push legislators toward the public's preference. Thus, our results support research going back at least to Mayhew () and fully formalized in Grossman and Helpman () on the importance of distinguishing between attentive and inattentive constituents in electoral politics.…”

Tying the politicians’ hands: The optimal limits to representative democracy

“…On the other hand, there is also some evidence that politicians respond more to constituency if they face the prospect of re‐election contests. For example, Christensen and Ejdemyr () found that elections in US cities tend to improve municipal services, but they also create cycles in constituency responsiveness. Reviewing empirical tests of the predictions of political economy models of election, Christensen and Ejdemyr (, p. 2) reported that “these models have been refuted almost as many times as they have been supported.”…”

“…Other papers on optimal delegation have provided conditions for the optimality of interval delegation under various settings. In Amador, Werning, and Angeletos (), the present self delegates to the future self the future consumption/saving decision; Alonso and Matouschek () studied the issue of how to regulate the future regulators; Ambrus and Egorov () obtained specific results by assuming uniform distributions and quadratic utility functions. A recent paper by Amador and Bagwell () provides necessary and sufficient conditions which encompass previous results as special cases .…”

The Effect of Election Proximity on Government Responsiveness and Citizens’ Participation: Evidence From English Local Elections

“…Related literature works on political cycles (Nordhaus, 1975) and on recency bias in retrospective voting (Healy & Lenz, 2014; Huber et al, 2012) suggest that politicians increase effort as elections loom near. If true—and this proposition is still debated (Christensen & Ejdemyr, n.d.)—incumbents would be (on average) more responsive to constituents’ requests; in our context, they would ensure complaints are addressed faster. In such case, to the extent that constituents consider the expected benefit of their (political) actions, we should observe an increase in the rate of reporting of street-related problems prior to elections.…”