Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (in American Cities): How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable
Cities in the U.S. often feature public services that pale in comparison to their peers among global cities. Do voters hold specific local elected officials accountable for performance in important local policy areas such as the economy, crime, street repair, or schools? Urban politics – and the provision of public services in U.S. cities – are defined by both complex jurisdictions with shared overlapping authority and a paucity of information about local governments. I leverage new data from post-election surveys in numerous cities across the U.S., alongside macro-level data on thousands of local elections for mayor, city council, and school board over the last three decades combined with performance data to assess retrospective voting in cities across policy areas. I zero in on important case studies of public services – road repair in Oakland, CA, and public transit in Boston, MA – to unpack the micro-level barriers to accountability in cities. The bevy of data that I use throughout the book paints a picture contrary to many popular conceptions of local governments as those “closest to the people.” Instead, institutional complexity and information deficits contribute to a fog of accountability in urban politics. American cities – and the voters who live there – suffer as a result.
Professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is an Associate Professor (untenured) of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His current research focuses on some of the most important policy areas that concern local governments, such as housing, transportation, policing, and economic development. His research also examines how citizens hold elected officials accountable, how representation translates the public's interests into policy via elections, and how people’s policy opinions are formed and swayed. He also teaches in Harvard's MPP program on politics and ethics, and leads elective courses on urban politics and policy. These classes include an experiential field lab that partners student teams with cities and towns to work on applied urban policy problems.
His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also received funding for this research from the MIT Election Data + Science Lab, Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and the Boston Area Research Initiative. Prior to joining Harvard, he was an assistant professor at Boston University, and before that a postdoctoral researcher at the Boston Area Research Initiative. He received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.A. in Government and Psychology from the College of William & Mary.