Who votes for mayor? Evidence from midsized American cities

Austin M. Aldag

Local Government Studies, 2019, vol. 45, issue 4, 526-545

Abstract: Who, or what, governs the mosaic of the almost 39,000 general purpose local governments across the United States? While the determinants of voter turnout in both national and sub-national elections have been well studied, there is a dearth of empirical literature examining voter turnout at the municipal level. Utilizing an original dataset of 356 midsized US cities drawn from the Midwest, South, and Northeast regions, this paper ponders the drivers of mayoral turnout, and asks if electoral timing, competitiveness, or characteristics of the electorate best predict turnout. Sequenced hierarchical linear models and OLS regressions are employed to control for sub-national effects, and model results indicate that election timing greatly dictate who governs midsized American cities. While local competitiveness and characteristics of the electorate also matter, their explanatory value is greatly over-shadowed by timing.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03003930.2019.1571997 (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:flgsxx:v:45:y:2019:i:4:p:526-545

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/flgs20

DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2019.1571997

Access Statistics for this article

Local Government Studies is currently edited by Helen Hancock

More articles in Local Government Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().