The Effect of Election Proximity on Government Responsiveness and Citizens’ Participation: Evidence From English Local Elections

• Author: Guy Grossman,Gemma Dipoppa
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414020912290
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020912290

Comparative Political Studies

2020, Vol. 53(14) 2183 –2212

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414020912290

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Article

The Effect of

Election Proximity

on Government

Responsiveness and

Citizens’ Participation:

Evidence From English

Local Elections

Gemma Dipoppa1 and Guy Grossman1,2

Abstract

Does political engagement depend on government responsiveness?

Identifying the drivers of political action is challenging because it requires

disentangling instrumental from expressive motives for engagement and

because government responsiveness is likely endogenous. We overcome the

first challenge by studying citizens’ reporting of street-problems—a form of

participation arguably driven by instrumental considerations. We overcome

the second challenge by taking advantage of variation in local elections timing

in England’s district authorities. We report three key results. First, local

governments address requests faster in the months leading to elections.

Second, street-problem reporting increases in (pre)electoral periods. Third,

the increase in requests sent in preelection periods is driven by districts

in which government responsiveness is higher. These findings show that,

individuals consider expected benefits when choosing to undertake at least

some instrumental forms of participation. Our results also underscore the

1University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

2Evidence in Governance and Politics, Berkeley, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Guy Grossman, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 428 Perelman

Center Bulding, 133 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.

Email: ggros@sas.upenn.edu

912290CPSXXX10.1177/0010414020912290Comparative Political StudiesDipoppa and Grossman

research-article2020

2184 Comparative Political Studies 53(14)

importance of temporal factors that increase the perceived benefits of one’s

political engagement.

Keywords

legislative studies, representation and electoral systems, political behavior,

political engagement, politics and technology

Introduction

Nonelectoral forms of political participation contribute to better governance,

but are subjected to free-rider problems. Theory suggests that such forms of

participation increase with government responsiveness, because a responsive

government increases the expected benefit of action (A. Campbell et al.,

1954). However, demonstrating this proposition rigorously is challenging

(Finkel, 1985). First, even when the decision to undertake political action is

rooted in a cost–benefit calculation, it is generally hard to separate instru-

mental from expressive forms of participation (Fiorina, 1976). Second, gov-

ernment responsiveness tends to be endogenous: responsiveness might be an

outcome and not a cause of an engaged citizenry, or it may be correlated with

(unobserved) factors that plausibly affect citizens’ choice to take action.

We address the first inferential problem by focusing on a form of political

action that is overwhelmingly driven by instrumental considerations.

Specifically, we examine the decisions of residents in England to log onto

FixMyStreet, an innovative online platform to report street-related problems:

from road potholes to street noise and graffiti. The platform collects geo-

referenced user messages and forwards them to the local district authority

responsible for fixing them. As many forms of political engagement, indi-

viduals decide whether to incur a relatively low-cost action (take a photo, tag

the location, and write a complaint) that benefits the larger community, or to

free-ride and count on other agents’ initiative.

We address the endogeneity problem using plausibly exogenous variation

in government responsiveness: the timing of local elections. Related litera-

ture works on political cycles (Nordhaus, 1975) and on recency bias in retro-

spective voting (Healy & Lenz, 2014; Huber et al., 2012) suggest that

politicians increase effort as elections loom near. If true—and this proposi-

tion is still debated (Christensen & Ejdemyr, n.d.)—incumbents would be (on

average) more responsive to constituents’ requests; in our context, they would

ensure complaints are addressed faster. In such case, to the extent that con-

stituents consider the expected benefit of their (political) actions, we should