Political Economy Workshop (Gov 3007)

Date: 

Monday, April 6, 2015, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

K354
Presentations given by Becca Goldstein and Simon Lapointe First, Becca Goldstein will present her paper (with Hye Young You) "Cities as Lobbyists: Local Public Goods, Representation, and Intergovernmental Lobbying," with Stephen Ansolabehere as discussant. Second Simon Lapointe will present his paper "The Role of Preferences and Group Diversity in the Opposition to Municipal Mergers: Evidence from Municipal Referendums in Quebec," with Melissa Sands as discussant. Abstract for Cities as Lobbyists: Local Public Goods, Representation, and Intergovernmental Lobbying Why do cities individually lobby the federal government? Local governments are the second-biggest constituency that lobbies the federal government, after corporations, and yet the dynamics of this intergovernmental lobbying are poorly understood. We argue that two types of political divergence affect a city’s decision to lobby. First, cities whose median political preferences diverge from the political preferences of their state are systematic losers in distributive politics and need to appeal to the federal government for additional funds. Second, cities whose median political preferences diverge from the preferences of their House representative need to appeal to federal government for funds that their House member is not securing. We provide evidence for this theory using a novel dataset of almost 14,000 lobbying disclosures filed by 1,451 large cities between 1999 and 2012. We find that political preference divergence between city and state, and particularly a city’s being more liberal than the state in which it resides, is a strongly positive predictor of the probability that the city lobbied the federal government. We also find that cites are more likely to lobby federal government when their House representative’s voting behavior is more conservative than city resident’s preference. We further find, using an instrumental variables analysis of earmark and grant data, that each dollar a city spends on lobbying generates about $30 worth of federal funds. Abstract for "The Role of Preferences and Group Diversity in the Opposition to Municipal Mergers: Evidence from Municipal Referendums in Quebec" This paper contributes to the vast literature on municipal consolidations, but, instead of looking directly at mergers, it studies voters’ decisions to de-merge from the consoli- dated municipality. It takes advantage of a large and original dataset of results from referendum on municipal secessions from the Canadian province of Quebec in 2004. Not surprisingly, I find that differences in income and language (a strong indicator of social group in Quebec) affect the choice of voters. More interesting, however, is that income differences affect the voters’ choice only when language differences are also present. This result is interpreted as the existence of a group loyalty effect; voters more willingly accept sharing a jurisdiction with people with different preferences when they share a common cultural group (in this case, linguistic group).