Municipal Election Timing and Local Growth Controls

In this paper, I argue that the timing of city council elections plays a important role in shaping municipal land use policy. When elections are held off-cycle (i.e. on a date separate from high-profile national elections) interest groups that oppose new growth are more likely to turn out and vote. This stems from an asymmetry over the costs and benefits of growth: new housing development yields concentrated costs and diffuse benefits, so opposition groups are more likely to mobilize when doing so is costly. Using an extensive dataset on municipal election timing, I demonstrate that cities with off-cycle elections have higher home prices and issue fewer building permits than comparable cities with on-cycle elections. This finding holds both in a crosssectional matching analysis and a difference-in-difference analysis of cities that shifted their election timing. The most recent version of this paper is available at: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/ornstein/election-timing/ ∗PhD Candidate, University of Michigan. Many thanks to Liz Gerber, Clayton Nall, and all the participants at the 2017 APSA Pre-Conference on Local Political Economy for their helpful comments.