Partisan Polarization in Local Politics

Abstract

A growing body of scholarship investigates the extent to which national partisan polarization filters down to the local level. There has been little evidence, however, on: (1) the size of the local partisan divide; (2) the extent to which it varies by policy issue; and (3) how these divides compare at the elite and the mass public levels. Using responses to questions about local policy preferences from nearly a decade of nationwide surveys of mayors and from 25,521 members of the public in 87 cities between 2020 and 2023, we uncover notable variation in local partisan polarization. We find substantial polarization across a number of local policy issue areas and less in others. Just as others have found at the national level, we find that elite partisan polarization is more substantial than it is among members of the public on nearly every policy issue for which we have directly comparable data. We also find, by using the subset of data for which we have mayors and their constituents answering identical questions, that mayors take positions aligned with their constituents’ about 61% of the time. While Democratic mayors align with their Democratic constituents more than with their Republican ones, and Republican mayors do the opposite, the differences are modest against the background of polarization in America. Together, these results reaffirm the pre-eminence of partisanship in the formation of public opinion, challenge a traditional consensus that local politics is apartisan, and establish scope conditions on when partisanship might shape the policy outputs of local government.