Building Green: Local Political Leadership Addressing Climate Change

Municipal agreements have been instrumental in communicating commitment to addressing climate change at the local level. However, what is the practical implication of this potentially symbolic decision? This study examines the power of mayoral participation in climate change agreements in driving the proliferation of sustainable or “green” building in a city as a mechanism to reach its climate change goals. In addition, mayors can localize what is otherwise a public good by framing green buildings as having other tangible impacts on a community. We analyze the impact of political leadership on green building projects in 591 cities in 50 U.S. states, controlling for a variety of city‐ and state‐level variables. Hierarchical models indicate that mayoral leadership in climate change policy fosters green building, while state‐level predictors are not as important as city policy in creating green buildings. Our research concludes that local governments can be a very effective venue in addressing broad climate change goals.     

Holding Mayors Accountable: New York's Executives from Koch to Bloomberg

How do citizens evaluate the performance of their mayors? Previous studies have examined mayoral performance either with cross‐sectional surveys or by comparing pairs of consecutive elections. In this article, we use 150 surveys conducted in New York City between 1984 and 2009 to carry out the first time‐series analysis of mayoral approval. We show that fluctuations in crime and the economy affect mayors’ ratings and that black and white citizens react similarly to changing local conditions (although their initial evaluations of mayors often diverge sharply). We also show that how New Yorkers rate mayors in the polls is closely related to how they vote for mayors at the polls.     

Money,candidates, and mayoral elections

In this paper, we extend a well-trod line of research from congressional and state-level elections—the electoral impact of campaign expenditures and candidate characteristics—to a relatively understudied context, urban mayoral elections. Using a sample of large U.S. cities, we provide evidence that mayoral elections are very similar to elections at other levels of office: there is a tremendous incumbency advantage, one that is overcome only with great effort; campaign spending is closely tied to incumbent vote share but it is challenger rather than incumbent spending that seems to drive outcomes; and challengers are hopelessly outspent. In addition, we find that the effect of local economic conditions on incumbent success is mediated by challenger spending and that incumbent candidates fare better in racially diverse settings.     

The Development of Local Discretionary Authority in New York

Central control of cities was established policy during thecolonial period. The policy was continued after independence.By 1839, all cities were allowed to elect their mayors, anda movement commenced to limit the powers of the legislatureover local governments. An 1874 constitutional amendment forbadethe legislature to enact a special or local bill in seven areas,and the 1894 constitution allowed a city to veto a special cityact, subject to repassage by the legislature. Although constitutionalamendments in 1923, 1935, 1938, and 1963 broadened local powers,the Court of Appeals in the 1920s and 1930s tended to restrictthe powers of local governments. The most important changesin the powers of local governments have occurred since 1980as the result of advisory opinions, issued by the attorney generaland state comptroller, broadening the powers of local governments.Nevertheless, the legislature retains the authority to enactgeneral laws imposing mandates and restraints upon local governments.Such mandates and restraints are responsible for New York beingranked thirty-fifth in terms of discretionary authority grantedto local governments.     

Ideology and Vote Choice in U.S. Mayoral Elections: Evidence from Facebook Surveys

City elections in the U.S. are widely thought to be low-information contests decided by non-ideological factors. This consensus casts doubt on the possibility of electoral accountability in cities, and renders recent evidence of municipal responsiveness puzzling. However, our knowledge of how voters actually behave in local elections is severely limited by a lack of individual-level survey data collected from local contests. Using three such original surveys, I re-examine the role of ideology in mayoral elections, recruiting samples of local voters via geotargeted Facebook advertisements. In two large cities, I find ideology is a powerful and independent predictor of vote choice. Using a panel design, I find voters learn the relative ideological positions of candidates over the course of a campaign, and that learning causally impacts vote choice. The effect of ideology also replicates in a conjoint experiment fielded to a sample of small-city voters in another region. Electoral accountability is thus a plausible explanation for ideological responsiveness in U.S. cities, and the methodological tools introduced here can now be applied to a variety of questions about local voter behavior.     

English Councillors and Mayoral Governance: Developing a New Dynamic for Political Accountability

Much has been written about the arrival of directly elected mayors into the English political landscape. The responses of the councillors serving on those councils to the arrival of elected mayors, has by comparison, been neglected. Yet, the construction, by councillors of a new role as the guarantor of local political accountability within mayoral councils, requires councillors to develop new patterns of political behaviour which challenge long‐held assumptions about the role of the councillor as a political representative. The paper reports the findings of research conducted amongst councillors on England's mayoral authorities, which explored how councillors have responded to the arrival of an elected mayor and what mayoral government means for our understanding of the role of the councillor within English local government.     

Mayoral Quality and Local Public Finance

In most local developing settings, the political leader and the municipal manager are embodied in the same figure, the directly elected mayor. This research explores the impact of mayoral quality on local public finances in a developing country. Mayoral quality is operationalized as educational background and job-related expertise to analyze its impact on two local financial indicators: property tax collection and social spending per capita. The mayoral quality thesis is tested across 40 Colombian municipalities over five years (2000–2004). After considering other political, economic, and external influences, the findings reveal that mayoral quality is associated with greater property tax collection and more social spending per capita. This positive influence, however, decreases under external constraints—such as presence of illegal armed groups. This study demonstrates how much influence the mayor can have when circumstances permit. The findings point to the significance of electing qualified mayors, as decentralization may not directly improve subnational finance. Instead, through decentralization, qualified mayors contribute to improved local public finance.     

Executive capacity to control legislatures and presidential choice of cabinet ministers in East Asian democracies

How do presidents in new democracies choose cabinet ministers to accomplish their policy goals? Contrary to existing studies explaining the partisan composition of the cabinet with institutional characteristics, such as formal authority, we argue that the broader political context surrounding the president's ability to control the legislature can affect cabinet partisanship. By analyzing original data on cabinet formation in all presidential systems in East Asia since democratization, we find that when presidents are more likely to be dominant in executive–legislative relations, they have less concern about legislative support and more leeway to focus on policy performance by appointing nonpartisan cabinet members. This analysis suggests that understanding cabinet partisanship requires a view of cabinet appointments as a trade‐off between securing legislative support and managing policy performance, and the scope of this compromise depends on the strength of the president vis‐à‐vis the legislature.     

Charismatic Urban Leaders and Economic Development: Good Mayors and Bad Mayors in Europe

The paper argues that decisions by strong mayors or council leaders can have a significant impact on their cities' economic fortunes. Good decisions include urban marketing exercises, the attraction of hallmark events and good land-use and infrastructural planning: bad decisions include engaging in political conflict with central government and engaging in illegal activity. Data from 16 European cities approximately arranged in matched national pairs to standardise for the degree of power decentralised to city government, and further standardised to take into account economic structure, suggest that good mayoral decisions have a marginally positive effect on economic growth but poor decisions have a significantly negative effect.     

Political Orientation,Party Affiliation,and American Attitudes Towards China

Little is known about how the political orientations and party affiliations of ordinary Americans impact their perceptions of China. Based on our surveys, we find that partisanship does indeed impact American views of China. Self-reported “conservatives” perceive significantly greater threat in China’s rise, hold more negative views of the Chinese government, exhibit more prejudice towards the Chinese people, and advocate a much tougher U.S. China policy than self-reported “liberals” do. Republicans perceive significantly greater threat from China and advocate tougher China policies than Democrats do, but party affiliation has a lesser impact on prejudice scores. Regression analyses reveals that education, gender, and age each has an impact on American views of China, but that impact is negligible compared to partisanship.     

The Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion

Local policy adoptions provide an excellent opportunity to test among potential mechanisms of policy diffusion. By examining three types of antismoking policy choices by the 675 largest U.S. cities between 1975 and 2000, we uncover robust patterns of policy diffusion, yielding three key findings. First, we distinguish among and find evidence for four mechanisms of policy diffusion: learning from earlier adopters, economic competition among proximate cities, imitation of larger cities, and coercion by state governments. Second, we find a temporal component to these effects, with imitation being a more short‐lived diffusion process than the others. Third, we show that these mechanisms are conditional, with larger cities being better able to learn from others, less fearful of economic spillovers, and less likely to rely on imitation.     

Who benefits? Intergovernmental transfers,subnational politics and local spending in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the intervening role that local political elites play to translate government transfers into effective public spending. We want to know whether mayors spend IGTs to provide basic public services or infrastructure works, and whether such investments are instrumental to secure their advantage as incumbents. To test these arguments, we use a combined dataset of local public finances between 2001 and 2015 and electoral results for the 2009 and 2014 municipal elections in Ecuador. We find that mayors do respond to political incentives and make strategic spending decisions to invest on public services and visible infrastructure projects. However, we find selective spending was insufficient to secure incumbency advantage in the 2014 election. We argue that the executive intervened to block or limit the impact of spending decisions at the local level, thus creating an incumbency disadvantage for mayors. Further research is needed to explain this.     

Beyond (and Within) City Limits: Climate Policy in an Intergovernmental System

This analysis explores the role of city‐level and state‐level variables to explain why some cities make more progress on climate‐related policy implementation than others. Using multilevel modeling, we find little support for the influence of state factors on local government leadership among the 812 cities in the dataset, but local government institutional and community variables are strongly associated with climate policy initiatives. We argue for a rethinking of the notion of the limited and constrained city and suggest that, in the realm of climate protection and environmental policy, cities are leading a bottom‐up federalism. Moreover, where some political analysts and scholars have argued that climate protection and environmental policies may not be economically rational for cities to pursue, we theorize that cities are acting locally to further their self‐interest in an increasingly global economy.     

Ideology,Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments–embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials–expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co‐partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan‐based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.     

Curbside recycling: Waste resource or waste of resources?

In this paper, we address the often contentious debate over state and local recycling policy by carefully estimating the social net benefit of curbside recycling. Benefits are estimated using household survey data from over 4,000 households across 40 western U.S. cities. We calibrate household willingnesstopay for hypothetical bias using an innovative experimental design that contrasts stated and revealed preferences. Cost estimates are compiled from previous studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Institute for Local Self Reliance, and from indepth interviews with recycling coordinators in our sampled cities. Across our sample of cities, we find that the estimated mean social net benefit of curbside recycling is almost exactly zero. On a citybycity basis, however, our social netbenefit analysis often makes clear predictions about whether a curbside recycling program is an efficient use of resources. Surprisingly, several curbside recycling programs in our sample appear to be inefficient. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

A voter-centric explanation of the success of ideological candidates for the U.S. house

In recent years, ideological candidates for the U.S. House have become increasingly successful, to the point where their chances of being elected are indistinguishable from moderates. However, scholars have still not uncovered exactly why this is happening. Using survey data from the American National Election Studies, I find that voter-centric explanations of vote choice – a voter's partisanship, ideology, and presidential approval rating – have increasingly predicted their vote choice in U.S. House elections from 1980 to 2016. Using data on candidate ideology, I find that candidate ideology is an increasingly poor predictor of individual vote choice over time. Original experimental data supports these claims, finding only a small electoral advantage for moderates, compared to ideologues of their own party, and evidence suggesting that, at least among Democrats, ideological candidates are rated more favorably than moderates. Taken together, these results suggest that the increased electoral success of ideological candidates can be attributed to changes in voters' decision calculus, rather than structural or candidate-centric explanations.     

The West in Flames: The Intergovernmental Politics of Wildfire Suppression and Prevention

This research examines changes in the intergovernmental policyarrangements governing the control of wildfires in the westernUnited States. For much of the twentieth century, the policymakingstructure resembled Deil S. Wright's inclusive authority modelwhereby fire policy was dominated by the U.S. Forest Servicewith the states playing a supporting role. More recently, thestates have become increasingly important in the decision-makingprocess because of changes in residential patterns and land-usepreferences that require greater intergovernmental coordinationin presuppression and suppression activities within urban/wildlandintermix areas, the rise in the number of large wildfires withinnational forests, and the willingness of Congress to approveinstitutional arrangements that give more weight to local communityinterests. Thus, the current approach increasingly resemblesthe overlapping authority model where multiple governmentaljurisdictions share decision-making responsibility on wildfirecontrol policies.     

The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income‐Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records

Why does the relationship between income and partisanship vary across U.S. regions? Some answers to this question have focused on economic context (in poorer environments, economics is more salient), whereas others have focused on racial context (in racially diverse areas, richer voters oppose the party favoring redistribution). Using 73 million geocoded registration records and 185,000 geocoded precinct returns, we examine income‐based voting across local areas. We show that the political geography of income‐based voting is inextricably tied to racial context, and only marginally explained by economic context. Within homogeneously nonblack localities, contextual income has minimal bearing on the income‐party relationship. The correlation between income and partisanship is strong in heavily black areas of the Old South and other areas with a history of racialized poverty, but weaker elsewhere, including in urbanized areas of the South. The results demonstrate that the geography of income‐based voting is inseparable from racial context.     

Electoral and structural losers and support for a national referendum in the U.S.

The U.S. is one of only a few democracies in the world never to hold a national referendum. Recent national surveys reveal that a majority of respondents approve of a national referendum both cross-nationally and in America is relatively stable. Building on previous work (Bowler and Donovan, 2007), we find public opinion on a reform proposal is fluid and responsive to electoral politics, rather than stable as reported in earlier work. In this paper, we argue that contemporary support for a national referendum in the U.S. is contingent on whether a citizen is a short- or long-term “winner” or a “loser” when it comes to electoral politics. We expect that public support for a national referendum in the U.S., where legislation referred by Congress would be subject to a popular vote, may vary at the individual level because of short-term electoral fortunes as well as long-term structural conditions. Strategic voting as well as losing in candidate races and policy issues may be important, but so might be partisanship, with non-partisans the most likely to benefit from citizen law-making at the national level. Support for a national referendum might also be contingent upon state context, that is, upon use of direct democracy in the state where a person lives, as well as the population of a state. The results based on a natural experiment and 2008 panel survey data provide an important window into understanding public opinion on institutional change more broadly.     

Multi-level governance in the EU and EU democracy: Democratic legitimacy,democratic accountability and transparency of the European offices of the English local authorities in Brussels

This paper seeks to examine the role and functions of the representative offices of English local authorities in Brussels by considering the democratic legitimacy (i.e. linkage to elected councillors or mayors), accountability and transparency of the office’s activities. The study demonstrates that the offices differ in their governance arrangements and funding, which has a direct impact on the approach to democratic legitimacy and accountability, noting that those offices which rely most heavily on direct funding from a single authority or a combined authority have the closest links to the authorities concerned. The transparency of the offices varies considerably, with clear distinctions between offices that are creatures of contract or where offices are an emanation of the authority concerned. The pattern here is less dependent on the pattern of funding of the office and depends more on the availability of resources and the approach adopted by the office itself.