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Strategic government communication about performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Justin de Benedictis-Kessner Open the ORCID record for Justin de Benedictis-Kessner [Opens in a new window]
Justin de Benedictis-Kessner*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 John F. Kennedy St., Cambridge, MA 02138
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

A great deal of research presents the correspondence between economic conditions and incumbent electoral fortunes as evidence of democratic accountability. A central theoretical mechanism for this phenomenon is that voters have information about performance. Using communications data consisting of more than 110,000 government press releases from cities in the US combined with fine-grained economic and crime data, I leverage the breadth of local variation in conditions to assess the inputs to this mechanism behind accountability. I provide causal evidence that government communication changes as a result of performance in a strategic manner: local politicians are more likely to communicate about both economic conditions and crime when performance is improving—better wages and less crime—than when performance is worse. These findings add direct evidence from the underutilized area of local politics that politicians strategically communicate in a way that threatens accountability.

Keywords

Accountabilitycrimeeconomylocal politicspolitical communicationretrospective voting
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 601 - 616
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AJ7LEB
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