Political Participation

POLS 4641: The Science of Cities

Where We Left Off

Last week, we focused on horizontal fragmentation: many local governments competing for residents and investment (Tiebout 1956).

• In that world, competition creates a “race to the bottom” – strong incentives to cut taxes to attract mobile capital and residents.

Today, two wrinkles that complicate that picture:

1. Vertical fragmentation: most of those ~90,000 governments are spatially overlapping – multiple jurisdictions exercising different functions over the same geographic area (Berry 2009).

2. Selective participation: citizens only turn out when they deeply care about a particular government’s functions, creating systematic biases in who gets represented.

Two related theoretical concepts that motivate these ideas:

• Common pool resource problems (Hardin 1968).

• Collective action problems (Olson 1965).

Both wrinkles point in the same direction: they tend to push taxes up, not down. That’s the surprising result we’re going to build toward.

Common Pools

The “Tragedy of the Commons”

The commons: sheep, fish, and clean air all share the same problem. One actor’s consumption reduces what’s available for everyone else, but each actor ignores that externality when making decisions.

Common Pool Resources

A common pool resource is a good that is:

• Non-excludable: you can’t easily prevent people from using it.
• Rival: one person’s use diminishes availability for others.

Classic examples: fisheries, shared pastures, clean air.

The problem: each individual actor has an incentive to overuse the shared resource, ignoring the costs they impose on everyone else. Left unchecked, the result is overexploitation – “the tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968).

Vertical Fragmentation and Taxes

• The same logic applies when multiple governments draw from the same tax base.

• Each government sets its own tax rate without fully accounting for the burden this places on taxpayers alongside every other government’s levies.

• Result: collectively, they tend to overtax relative to what a single consolidated government would do (Berry 2009).

Berry (2009) provides empirical evidence: areas with more overlapping special districts end up with higher total tax burdens than comparable areas with fewer governments, even controlling for spending levels.

Historical Example: Rhine River Tolls

The Rhine River: major industrial heartland of Europe. During the medieval era, there were about 13 independent city-states along the river. Each one charged tolls to river boats passing through – every prince wanted their share. But together, they made long-distance shipping so expensive that they effectively stifled trade for centuries.

~13 independent city-states. Each one levied tolls on passing river boats. Collectively, they taxed trade into near-stagnation for centuries – a vivid historical example of the common pool resource problem applied to taxation.

“Overfishing the Common Tax Pool”

There are three governments with the authority to tax my home in Clarke County.

“Overfishing the Common Tax Pool”

By contrast, there are fourteen governments taxing this home in Evanston, Illinois!

Each of those 14 governments is making independent decisions about its budget. None of them fully internalizes the burden they’re adding on top of all the others. This is why Berry finds that more fragmented areas tend to have higher overall tax burdens.

Collective Action

What About The Voters?

• If vertical fragmentation drives taxes up, why can’t voters just elect officials who promise to lower taxes?

  • Because keeping track of fourteen different governments is really hard!

  • A single local government is relatively easy to monitor and hold accountable.

  • Dozens of overlapping jurisdictions are not.

• This is exacerbated by the fact that local governments almost always hold their elections off-cycle.

Off-Cycle Elections

• Most counties, cities, special districts, and school districts hold elections off-cycle – i.e. not on Election Day.

• Far fewer voters turn out when there are no state or federal offices on the ballot (Berry and Gersen 2010).

• Historically, off-cycle election timing was part of a broad set of political reforms implemented during the Progressive Era (early 20th century).

  • In many cases, chosen deliberately to reduce turnout and curb the power of big city political machines (Sarah F. Anzia 2012a).

Anzia’s key insight: off-cycle timing doesn’t just reduce turnout randomly. It selectively depresses turnout among low-information, low-stakes voters, leaving elections to be decided by highly engaged interest groups.

Who Shows Up?

• Low turnout doesn’t mean random turnout.

• Those who turn out to vote tend to be groups with a strong, concentrated interest in the outcome:

  • Teachers’ unions turn out heavily in school board elections (Sarah F. Anzia 2012b).

  • Homeowners are much more likely to vote in municipal elections (Yoder 2020).

• Or people with a high propensity to vote regardless of timing:

  • Voters 65 years and older are highly over-represented in off-cycle school district elections (Kogan, Lavertu, and Peskowitz 2017).

• These patterns in voter turnout reflect a collective action problem (Olson 1965).

  • Certain groups of voters have a concentrated interest in higher public spending, so are particularly motivated to vote.

  • Most voters have a diffuse interest in policy outcomes: they’ll pay slightly higher taxes. This is rarely enough to motivate participation.

Evidence from State-Level Reforms

• In 2006, Texas passed HB 1, which compelled 20% of the state’s school districts to switch from off-cycle to on-cycle election timing.

  • Sarah F. Anzia (2012b) estimates that the timing switch caused those districts to pay 1.3% lower teacher salaries than districts that were not compelled to switch timing.

• In 2018, California passed a more sweeping law—the “California Voter Participation Rights Act” (CVPRA)—requiring all local governments to switch their timing concurrent with statewide elections.

  • Lots more people now vote in California local elections. Voters who turn out are younger, more diverse, and more likely to rent.

  • Some evidence that Latino candidates are more likely to win local public office after CVPRA(Hajnal, Kogan, and Markarian 2025).

  • No clear evidence that CVPRA has affected taxes, public spending, or teacher salaries (Ornstein 2024).

Takeaways

1. Vertical fragmentation creates a common pool resource problem: overlapping governments tend to collectively overtax.
2. Off-cycle elections and the logic of collective action mean that organized interest groups are systematically over-represented in local politics.
3. Institutional design matters – the timing of elections, the number of governments, and the rules of participation all shape who shows up and whose interests are represented.

References

Anzia, Sarah F. 2012a. “Partisan Power Play: The Origins of Local Election Timing as an American Political Institution.” Studies in American Political Development 26 (1): 24–49. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X11000149.

Anzia, Sarah F. 2012b. “The Election Timing Effect: Evidence from a Policy Intervention in Texas.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 7: 209–48. https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00011056.

Berry, Christopher R. 2009. Imperfect Union: Representation and Taxation in Multilevel Governments. Cambridge University Press.

Berry, Christopher R., and Jacob E. Gersen. 2010. “The Timing of Elections.” The University of Chicago Law Review 77 (37): 37–64.

Hajnal, Zoltan L., Vladimir Kogan, and G. Agustin Markarian. 2025. “Who Wins When? Election Timing and Descriptive Representation.” American Journal of Political Science 69 (4): 1454–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12930.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162: 1243–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/19390450903037302.

Kogan, Vladimir, Stephane Lavertu, and Zachary Peskowitz. 2017. “Election Timing, Electorate Composition, and Policy Outcomes: Evidence from School Districts.” Forthcoming.

Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ornstein, Joseph T. 2024. “Election Timing Revisited: Evidence from California’s Voter Participation Rights Act.”

Tiebout, Charles M. 1956. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” The Journal of Political Economy 64 (5): 416–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/257839.

Yoder, Jesse. 2020. “Does Property Ownership Lead to Participation in Local Politics? Evidence from Property Records and Meeting Minutes.” American Political Science Review 114 (4): 1213–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000556.