Person:

de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin

Housing policy is one of the most important areas of local politics. Yet little is known about how local legislatures and executives make housing policy decisions and how their elections shape policy in this important realm. We leverage housing policy data and a new data source of 13,602 city council elections and 2,716 mayoral elections in large cities in the United States and a regression discontinuity design to examine partisan divides in housing policy among the mass public as well as the impact of local leaders’ partisanship on housing policy. We provide robust evidence that electing mayors from different political parties shapes cities’ housing stock. Electing a Democrat as mayor leads to increased multi-family housing production. These effects are concentrated in cities where councils have less power over land use changes. Overall, our paper shows that politics influences local housing policy, and it contributes to a larger literature on local political economy.

The study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new dataset of nearly 55,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties in the U.S. over the last three decades. Our data provide partisan and demographic information about candidates in these races as well as electoral outcomes. We demonstrate the utility of these data with three applications: the descriptive representation of women and race/ethnic groups among candidates and office-holders, the partisan nationalization of local contests, and the match between district partisanship and local politicians’ voting records in city councils. Together, our data provide a myriad of opportunities for future research on subnational politics and remove a significant barrier to the study of representation and elections in local governments.