Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Citizen Input, Policy Outcomes, and Local Representation.

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

One of the most difficult choices for democratic societies is whether representatives are to be elected by voters or appointed by other officials. This project asks how the choice affects representation, testing two hypotheses from existing political science research. First, do direct elections lead to more representation of the majority's preferences, relative to appointment? Second, do direct elections cause certain groups - special interests" - to receive better representation than others? I address these questions by leveraging the substantial variation in local institutions, assembling original data sets on three local offices in three states: property tax assessors; school board members; and fire protection district trustees. Upon completion of the project, these unique data sets of political institutions and policy outcomes will be disseminated to the broader scholarly community, constituting a significant public good. The intellectual merit of this project is related to its contribution to the study of institutions and local governance. The project focuses on these three cases for two key reasons. First, each case includes a significant number of political jurisdictions (towns, school districts, or fire districts) that change from direct elections to appointment (or vice versa) over time. If the analysis were to simply compare jurisdictions that elect or appoint at a single point in time - the approach of most existing studies of this question - it would be difficult to assess whether any difference in policy was due to direct elections, or due to pre-existing differences that are associated with the decision to elect. In contrast, the focus on jurisdictions that change permits comparison of policy outcomes between jurisdictions that elect or appoint, while controlling for any differences that existed prior to the switch. Second, each of the offices under examination is responsible for making decisions that have tangible impacts on citizens' lives. Thus, by examining how direct elections shape property tax assessments, standardized test scores, and fire department response times, the research will facilitate an evaluation of the link between citizens and government more precisely than other studies of representation that analyze indirect measures of policy outcomes. The broader impacts of the project are associated with its contributions to the study of political institutions and local government. More practically, the findings from this project will help to inform a public policy question - how officials should be selected - with which countless organizations, from state and local governments to private boards, actively wrestle with. Through stronger research designs and original data gathering, this project seeks to offer more credible policy prescriptions than do the handful of conflicting findings from existing studies.