UC Davis

What role do political institutions play in shaping the political behavior of citizens, candidates, and elected officials at the municipal level? In three distinct chapters, I examine the effects of two institutions, district-based city council seats and Ranked-Choice Voting, on these three groups of political actors. In the first chapter, I examine how the adoption of district elections affects the legislative attentions of city councilmembers. Using an original method for extracting and categorizing agenda items from city council meeting records and a regression discontinuity design, I find that councilmembers elected from city districts spend less time on particularistic issues compared to those elected at-large. Furthermore, this shift in attention occurs whenever a city converts at-large seats to district seats. Finally, I find that this shift is likely due to a change in candidate entry dynamics, with fewer business leaders and lawyers and more activist candidates running in council elections following the switch. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I examine whether the implementation of a Ranked Choice Voting System increases the number, diversity, and quality of candidates competing in local elections. Using original data from 273 cities across three decades and employing a pre-registered difference-in-differences design with matching, I find that the size of the candidate pool increases following implementation. However, this effect dissipates in later election cycles, indicating that RCV has no long-term effect on candidate entry. Indeed, the short-term increase in the candidate pool mostly reflects increased entry by low-quality candidates with little chance of winning. Additionally, I find that RCV has no effect on the proportion of female and non-White candidates running for office. In the final chapter of my dissertation, I examine how the information environment affects political expression and spatial voting in RCV elections as well as how endorsement information interacts with different information environments to affect political expression and spatial voting. In a survey experiment conducted in the lead up to New York City's 2021 Democratic Primary, my coauthors and I test how endorsement information affects respondent rankings for mayoral, comptroller, and city council races. We find that respondents utilize more rankings and vote more spatially in higher prestige offices, but that the endorsement information provided is most effective in lower prestige offices. Furthermore, we find that while ideological group endorsements encourage more spatial voting, union endorsements have a effect on political expression. Finally, we find that these effects are not specific to certain demographic groups, and are instead caused by a change in an individual-level characteristic, internal efficacy. Across the three chapters of my dissertation, I find that institutional arrangements have direct effects on political actors at the municipal level that are either unexpected or counter to what was previously believed. These findings demonstrate that our understanding of local political institutions is lacking, and additional comparative research is needed to better understand how the political institutions municipal governments select shape their political environment.