Analysis: Left/Right binary a key predictor of local policy... and money drain
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In the Annual Review of Political Science, UC Berkeley political science prof Sarah Anzia relays: City gov'ts are traditionally studied via nonpartisan segments like homeowners. But new research shows that the Left to Right dimension does, indeed, strongly sway local policy outcomes—as “progressive” cities tend to vote for “progressive” laws and approve higher expenditures.
Research on urban and local politics long emphasized the distinctiveness of local government and was viewed within political science as something separate from “American politics” research. That has changed in recent years, as data and measurement innovations have revolutionized the study of local political representation and brought it into the mainstream of American politics research. It is good that American politics scholars are devoting more attention to local politics. Local government policies on policing, housing, public education, and taxes have profound and direct impacts on American citizens. They should be studied as an important part of American politics. And the new data and measures of local-level party affiliations and mass ideology are fantastic new resources for researchers, which have provided tremendous benefit to the discipline.
Notably, however, some of the conclusions of the newer quantitative empirical work that has ensued are at odds with the more traditional view that nationally forged partisan and ideological divisions matter less in local politics than in state and national politics. This newer research, equipped with new measures, focuses squarely on partisanship and ideology and finds that they do predict local policy outcomes....
The most significant advances have been made in measuring partisanship, public opinion, and ideology at the local level. Some researchers have compiled US presidential vote data at the level of county or municipal government and have found that greater Democratic vote share is associated with higher local government expenditures and greater expenditures on certain functions like public safety, parks and recreation, and infrastructure (Choi et al. 2010, Einstein & Kogan 2016, Sances 2019). Studies of elections in large cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, and Nashville find that voter ideology is an important predictor of vote choice (Abrajano et al. 2005, Boudreau et al. 2015, Sances 2018). Tausanovitch & Warshaw (2014) take a more expansive approach, pooling data from large national public opinion surveys and using multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate local ideology scores for more than 1,600 cities and towns. They find that cities with more liberal mass ideology have greater expenditures per capita (see also Palus 2010), raise more revenue, generate less revenue from sales taxes, and score lower on an index of policy conservatism constructed from data on local environmental policies.
Together, these findings are the basis of two important conclusions in this new literature. The first is that mass partisanship and ideology matter in local politics and, thus, that there is more room for politics in city government than Peterson (1981) argues. As Tausanovitch & Warshaw (2014, p. 621) write, “‘Liberal’ cities seem to get ‘liberal’ policies and ‘conservative’ cities seem to get ‘conservative’ policies. . . . This suggests that not only is city government political, but that it may have more in common with state and national politics than previous scholars have recognized.” The second conclusion is that local governments are responsive to mass preferences. To again quote Tausanovitch & Warshaw (2014, p. 614), “In substantive terms, the relationship between preferences and outcomes is tight. This suggests that city governments are responsive to the preferences of their citizens.”
This article originally appeared in Annual Review of Political Science. Read the whole thing here.
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