Patronage or Signaling: How Mayors Use City Payroll to Stay in Office
Several studies on municipal hiring decisions have indicated that when a city’s payroll grows, its mayor’s re-election prospects are likely to improve. It is not clear, however, if such an effect is attributable to patronage-driven, or signaling-driven, behavior of the incumbents. The difference is...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Sciendo
2016-12-01
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| Series: | International Journal of Area Studies |
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| Online Access: | http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ijas.2016.11.issue-2/ijas-2016-0008/ijas-2016-0008.xml?format=INT |
| Summary: | Several studies on municipal hiring decisions have indicated that when a city’s payroll grows, its mayor’s re-election prospects are likely to improve. It is not clear, however, if such an effect is attributable to patronage-driven, or signaling-driven, behavior of the incumbents. The difference is important: patronage leads to inefficient public administration, while signaling can produce political business cycles. In this paper, I propose some key electoral implications of patronage-driven and signaling-driven hiring, and verify them with data on local elections in Bulgaria (2015 and 2011) and in Poland (2014). I find that a large municipal workforce has a negative overall effect on mayors’ re-election. Importantly, the impact of city payroll varies with incumbents’ partisanship (strongly negative for mayors representing the economic right, neutral for independent mayors, positive for ex-communist mayors) and does not depend on the duration of incumbent’s tenure. These findings strongly support the patronage-driven explanation of Eastern Europe’s local political economy. |
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| ISSN: | 2029-2074 2345-0223 |