The Politics of Potholes: Service Quality and Retrospective Voting in Local Elections

Burnett, Craig M.; Kogan, Vladimir

doi:10.1086/688736

Cited by 53 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…However, we do so using data from highly localized contexts rather than more aggregate contextual units, where local experiences may be confounded by other factors. This speaks to the fruitfulness of studying how cues of economic performance experienced very locally may influence incumbent support and other politically relevant attitudes and beliefs (e.g., Burnett and Kogan 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do Citizens Respond Politically to the Local Economy? Evidence from Registry Data on Local Housing Markets

et al. 2019

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Recent studies of economic voting have focused on the role of the local economy, but with inconclusive results. We argue that while local economic conditions affect incumbent support on average, the importance of the local economy varies by citizens’ interactions with it. More recent and frequent encounters with aspects of the local economy make those aspects more salient and, in turn, feature more prominently in evaluations of the incumbent government. We label this process “context priming.” We provide evidence for these propositions by studying local housing markets. Linking granularly detailed data on housing prices from Danish public registries to both precinct-level election returns and an individual-level panel survey, we find that when individuals interact with the housing market, their support for the incumbent government is more responsive to changes in local housing prices. The study thus provides a framework for understanding when citizens respond politically to the local economy.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do Citizens Respond Politically to the Local Economy? Evidence from Registry Data on Local Housing Markets

et al. 2019

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“…Persistent support is not conclusive evidence of transactional gratitude for previous grant of rights; after all, voters do sometimes reward politicians long after the fact for services rendered (Burnett & Kogan ). Under most circumstances, however, voters’ memories are rather short: even scholars who argue against longstanding assumptions that voters are myopic in their retrospection typically only find effects for a small number of years (Bechtel & Hainmueller ; Wlezien ).…”

Section: Overseas Voters’ Loyalty To Enfranchisers: Cross‐national Comentioning

confidence: 99%

European ruling parties’ electoral strategies and overseas enfranchisement policies

Turcu

Urbatsch

2019

European J Political Res

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Emigrants' ideologies and partisan attitudes may diverge from other voters': overseas voters are ideologically self-selected, receive distinctive information about campaigns and have experiences abroad that are likely to shape their political views. Parties, anticipating these emigrant attitudes, can manipulate overseas voting availability to give the vote primarily to their own supporters. Alternatively, parties may expect newly enfranchised voters to provide electoral support in gratitude for the right to vote. To distinguish these separate processes, this project undertakes a case study of Turkey to trace a ruling party's strategic expectations as it makes overseas-enfranchisement decisions. To see how generalisable these results are, the study further extends to a statistical analysis of differences in vote choice between voters at home and abroad across all 23 European countries that report overseas votes separately, using an original dataset encompassing 121 elections. Both the case study and the statistical analysis suggest that emigrant-enfranchising parties tend to garner overseas voters' support in a lasting way. This suggests that overseas enfranchisement most often appears to involve incumbent parties (correctly) expecting long-term ideological compatibility with their overseas nationals, not simply exchanging the franchise for short-term, transactional support.

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“…In cities with high crime rates, respondents tend to report negative evaluations of local crime levels; in cities with relatively high unemployment, or with relatively large increases in unemployment, respondents are more likely to provide negative evaluations of the economy; and in cities with relatively low graduation rates, respondents provide negative evaluations of public schools. 9 This important and previously unreported finding helps bolster the connections some scholars have found between objective indicators and election outcomes at the local level (Arnold & Carnes, 2012;Berry & Howell, 2007;Burnett & Kogan, 2016;Holbrook & Weinschenk, 2014b;Hopkins & Pettingill, 2018;Lay & Tyburski, 2017) as those indicators are tied to mass perceptions of related local conditions.…”

Section: Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 89%

Are Perceptions of Local Conditions Rooted in Reality? Evidence From Two Large-Scale Local Surveys

Holbrook

Weinschenk

2019

American Politics Research

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In this research note, we test an assumption that is often made in the literature on local retrospective voting—that peoples’ perceptions of local conditions are well-grounded in reality. To do so, we examine the relationship between objective measures of local conditions and aggregated survey measures of perceptions of those conditions. We focus on three different conditions that have been shown to influence vote choice and approval at the local level—the state of the local economy, the quality of local public schools, and levels of local crime—and find strong evidence that perceptions of these conditions reflect actual local conditions. This important and previously unreported finding helps bolster the connections some scholars have found between objective indicators and election outcomes at the local level, as those indicators are tied to mass perceptions of related local conditions, which are connected to evaluations of incumbents. Overall, our results indicate that local electorates are well-positioned to hold local officials responsible. Given the general conception of the local electorate as disengaged, the strength and consistency of our findings are somewhat unexpected.

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The Politics of Potholes: Service Quality and Retrospective Voting in Local Elections

Cited by 53 publications

References 25 publications

When Do Citizens Respond Politically to the Local Economy? Evidence from Registry Data on Local Housing Markets

When Do Citizens Respond Politically to the Local Economy? Evidence from Registry Data on Local Housing Markets

European ruling parties’ electoral strategies and overseas enfranchisement policies

Are Perceptions of Local Conditions Rooted in Reality? Evidence From Two Large-Scale Local Surveys

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