Do Political Parties Matter? Evidence from U.S. Cities-super-*

Fernando V. Ferreira () and Joseph Gyourko ()

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2009, vol. 124, issue 1, pages 399-422

Abstract: Are cities as politically polarized as states and countries? "No" is the answer from our regression discontinuity design analysis, which shows that whether the mayor is a Democrat or a Republican does not affect the size of city government, the allocation of local public spending, or crime rates. However, there is a substantial incumbent effect for mayors. We investigate three mechanisms that could account for the striking lack of partisan impact at the local level, and find the most support for Tiebout competition among localities within metropolitan areas. (c) 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..

Date: 2009
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qjec.2009.124.1.399 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:qjecon:v:124:y:2009:i:1:p:399-422

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://mitpress.mit. ... me.tcl?issn=00335533

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is edited by Robert J. Barro, Edward L. Glaeser and Lawrence F. Katz

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from MIT Press
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().