Patronage or Signaling: How Mayors Use City Payroll to Stay in Office

• Main Author: Vobolevičius Vincentas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2016-12-01
• Series: International Journal of Area Studies
• Subjects: Patronage; signaling; local elections; municipal employment; partisanship; Bulgaria; Poland
• Online Access: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ijas.2016.11.issue-2/ijas-2016-0008/ijas-2016-0008.xml?format=INT

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.