Incumbency, divided government, partisan politics and council size : Essays in local political economics

Abstract: This thesis comprises four empirical papers, each devoted to a specific topic in local political economics. Paper one and two evaluate the importance of the mayor position to the future electoral success of the mayor’s party. In the first paper, the focus is on the party’s electoral outcome in subsequent mayoral elections, while the second paper is concerned with the interdependencies between the mayor’s office and elections on other levels of government. The third paper investigates the causal effect of individual parties on policy in the context of German town council politics. The objective is to measure the impact of political representation in a proportional election system on core fiscal decisions of the municipalities. The final paper studies the specific concerns when using population thresholds in regression discontinuity designs for causal inference (in the German case). The analysis reviews the German evidence on the link between the size of the legislation and government spending.