Sarah F. Anzia

Research shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, but studying how stereotyping affects women’s electoral chances raises a methodological problem: one can either measure stereotyping using surveys and experiments, or one can study outcomes of real elections—but not both. Most existing research does the former. We instead test whether patterns of women’s and men’s win rates in local elections match expectations for how the effects of gender stereotyping should vary: women should fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. Consistent with this, we find that women have a greater advantage in city council than mayoral races, a still greater advantage in school board races, and a decreasing advantage in more conservative constituencies. We also find the effects are largest where voters know less about local candidates. Thus, by studying real elections, we make progress toward understanding how voters affect women’s electoral success.

New scholarship in American politics argues that interest groups should be brought back to the center of the field. We attempt to further that agenda by exploring an aspect of group influence that has been little studied: the role interest groups play on the inside of government as official participants in bureaucratic decision-making. The challenges for research are formidable, but a fuller understanding of group influence in American politics requires that they be taken on. Here we carry out an exploratory analysis that focuses on the bureaucratic boards that govern public pensions. These are governance structures of enormous financial consequence for state governments, public workers, and taxpayers. They also make decisions that are quantitative (and comparable) in nature, and they usually grant official policymaking authority to a key interest group: public employees and their unions. Our analysis suggests that “interest groups on the inside” do have influence—in ways that weaken effective government. Going forward, scholars should devote greater attention to how insider roles vary across agencies and groups, how groups exercise influence in these ways, how different governance structures shape their policy effects, and what it all means for our understanding of interest groups in American politics.

The American politics literature on representation focuses on voters and elected officials, but a growing group of political scientists are arguing that more should be done to study interest groups. Yet there already is a large literature on interest groups, and it has struggled to show evidence of interest group influence. I argue here that the interest group literature’s near-exclusive focus on the federal government has hindered its progress: basic questions have gone unasked, important interest groups have gone underappreciated, and the amount of influence has been underestimated. By studying US subnational policymaking, scholars would discover different constellations of interest groups, and they would find that the variation in subnational governments allows for empirical designs that are better able to detect interest group influence when it exists. The payoffs of a subnational focus would be substantial—both for our understanding of interest groups and for the study of political representation.

When does a group of citizens influence public policy?  Mainstream American politics research emphasizes the importance of the group’s turnout and presence in the electorate, but there have been few empirical tests of those hypotheses.  Meanwhile, other scholars argue that group cohesiveness, organization, and non-voting political activity are potentially more important than voting for shaping policy.  These two strands of the literature have largely developed in parallel, however, in part because they tend to employ different empirical methods.  In this paper, I attempt to bridge the divide between them and test these ideas within the same empirical framework, using senior citizens and senior-friendly transportation policy as a test case.  My results show that senior voting does not unconditionally predict policies friendlier to seniors.  Instead, I find that city policies are friendlier to seniors when seniors are a more cohesive, meaningful group, and when they engage in activities other than voting.

For decades, America’s state and local governments have promised their workers increasingly generous pensions but failed to fully fund them, producing a fiscal problem of staggering proportions. In this paper, we examine the politics of public pensions. While mainstream theoretical ideas in the American politics literature would suggest the pension issue should be polarized, with Democrats pushing for generous pensions over Republican resistance, we develop an argument—rooted in more traditional theoretical work by Schattschneider, Lowi, Wilson, and others—implying that both parties should be expected to support generous pensions during normal times, and that only after the onset of the Great Recession, which expanded the scope of conflict, should the parties begin to diverge. Using a new dataset of state legislators’ votes on hundreds of pension bills passed between 1999 and 2011, we carry out an empirical analysis that supports these expectations.

Schattschneider’s insight that “policies make politics” has played an influential role in the modern study of political institutions and public policy. Yet if policies do indeed make politics, rational politicians have opportunities to use policies to structure future politics to their own advantage—and this strategic dimension has gone almost entirely unexplored.  Do politicians actually use policies to make politics?  Under what conditions?  In this paper, we develop a theoretical argument about what can be expected from strategic politicians, and we carry out an empirical analysis on a policy development that is particularly instructive: the adoption of public-sector collective bargaining laws by the states during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s—laws that fueled the rise of public-sector unions, and “made politics” to the advantage of Democrats over Republicans.  

Public sector unions are major interest groups in American politics, but they are rarely studied.  New research would not only shed much-needed light on how these unions shape government and politics, but also broaden the way scholars think about interest groups generally: by highlighting interests that arise inside governments, drawing attention to long-ignored types of policies and decision arenas, and underlining the importance of groups in subnational politics. Here we explore the effects of public sector unions on the costs of government. We present two separate studies, using different datasets from different historical periods, and we examine several outcomes: salaries, health benefits, and employment. We find that unions and collective bargaining increase the costs of government, and that the effects are substantively significant. We view this analysis as an opening wedge that we hope will encourage a more extensive line of new research—and new thinking about American interest groups.

Collective bargaining is common in American public education, but its consequences are poorly understood. We focus here on key contractual provisions—seniority-based transfer rights—that affect teacher assignments, and we show that these transfer rights operate to burden disadvantaged schools with higher percentages of inexperienced teachers. We also show that this impact is conditional: It is substantial in large districts, where decisions are likely to follow rules, but it is virtually zero in small districts, where decisions tend to be less formal and undesirable outcomes can more easily be avoided. The negative consequences are thus concentrated on precisely those districts and schools—large districts, high-minority schools—that have been the nation’s worst performers and the most difficult to improve.

A vast literature argues that the majority party in most legislatures enjoys a policymaking advantage through its access to gatekeeping institutions that let it block bills from reaching the floor. However, agenda-setting institutions vary substantially across legislatures. We propose that this variation should have demonstrable consequences for the majority party’s influence. In this article, we develop hypotheses about the institutional features of legislatures that enable the majority party to block bills. Then, we canvass all 99 U.S. state legislative chambers to measure whether those institutions are present and test whether they lower the rate at which the majority party is rolled. We find that in legislatures where majority-appointed committees can decline to hear bills or decline to report them to the floor, or where the majority leadership can block bills from appearing on the calendar, majority roll rates are significantly lower than in legislatures where those veto points are absent.

Many governments in the United States hold elections on days other than national Election Day. Recent studies have argued that the low voter turnout that accompanies such off-cycle elections could create an advantage for interest groups. However, the endogeneity of election timing makes it difficult to estimate its causal effect on political outcomes. In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework that explains how changes to election timing affect the electoral fortunes of organized interest groups. I test the theory by examining the effects of a 2006 Texas law that forced approximately 20 percent of the state’s school districts to move their elections to the same day as national elections. Using matching as well as district fixed effects regression, I estimate the causal effect of the switch to on-cycle election timing on district teacher salaries, since teachers and their unions tend to be the dominant interest group in school board elections. I find that school districts that were forced to switch to on-cycle elections responded by granting significantly lower salary raises to teachers, supporting the hypothesis that school trustees were less responsive to the dominant interest group after the switch.

Eighty percent of American cities today hold their general elections on different days than state and national elections. It is an established fact that voter turnout in these off-cycle local elections is far lower than turnout in local elections held concurrently with state and national elections. In this paper, I demonstrate that the timing of city elections has been an important determinant of voter turnout since before the Civil War. By examining three large American cities over the course of the nineteenth century, I find that American political parties regularly manipulated the timing of city elections to secure an edge over their rivals. I show that the decisions to change the election dates of these cities were contentious, partisan, and motivated by an expectation of subsequent electoral gain. The Progressive municipal reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued in this tradition when they separated city elections from state and national elections, and the local election schedule they implemented has largely persisted until today.

If voters are biased against female candidates, only the most talented, hardest working female candidates will succeed in the electoral process. Furthermore, if women perceive there to be sex discrimination in the electoral process, or if they underestimate their qualifications for office, then only the most qualified, politically ambitious females will emerge as candidates. We argue that when either or both forms of sex-based selection are present, the women who are elected to office will perform better, on average, than their male counterparts. We test this central implication of our theory by studying the relative success of men and women in delivering federal spending to their districts and in sponsoring legislation. Analyzing changes within districts over time, we find that congresswomen secure roughly 9% more spending from federal discretionary programs than congressmen. Women also sponsor and cosponsor significantly more bills than their male colleagues.

It is an established fact that off-cycle elections attract lower voter turnout than on-cycle elections. I argue that the decrease in turnout that accompanies off-cycle election timing creates a strategic opportunity for organized interest groups. Members of interest groups with a large stake in an election outcome turn out at high rates regardless of election timing, and their efforts to mobilize and persuade voters have a greater impact when turnout is low. Consequently, policy made by officials elected in off-cycle elections should be more favorable to the dominant interest group in a polity than policy made by officials elected in on-cycle elections. I test this theory using data on school district elections in the United States, in which teacher unions are the dominant interest group. I find that districts with off-cycle elections pay experienced teachers over 3% more than districts that hold on-cycle elections.

Some experts claim that U.S. local governments are experiencing dramatic increases in pension expenditures and that pension spending is crowding out government services. Others maintain that serious pension problems are limited. This issue is important to political scientists, urban scholars, and policy practitioners, but no existing studies—nor the datasets they rely on— allow evaluation of whether pension expenditures are rising or how they are affecting local government. This article analyzes a new dataset of the annual pension expenditures of over 400 municipalities and counties from 2005 to 2016. I find that pension expenditures rose almost everywhere over this period, but there is significant variation in that growth. On average, local governments are not responding to rising pension spending by increasing revenue. They are instead shrinking their workforces. Moreover, I find that the magnitude of the employment reductions due to pensions varies with key features of the political environment.