Arvind Krishnamurthy, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University, has agreed to tell us about some of his election-related research.
He’ll present joint work with Elisa Wirsching and Dvir Yogev entitled “Going Public: Bureaucratic Resistance and The Political Consequences of Police Slowdowns.”
Talk will be on Zoom, Friday, May 2, 09:00 (BJT).
Abstract: Canonical models of bureaucratic politics consider how political principals can effectively oversee bureaucratic agents. However, if voters update their beliefs about political principals based on the quality of public service provisioned by bureaucrats, bureaucratic agents have substantial power over political principals. Specifically, we argue that bureaucrats can leverage their control over service delivery as a political tool to resist reforms they oppose, undermining the reelection prospects of misaligned political principals. If voters do not discount poor public service provision in the face of potential bureaucratic malfeasance, agents have the power to shape public attitudes towards politicians. We call this phenomenon bureaucratic resistance shirking. We study this question in the context of municipal police. First, using survey experimental evidence that systematically varies the quality of public service and a signal of possible police resistance shirking, we find that respondents punish incumbent politicians when policy outcomes are poor and do not discount this electoral punishment in the face of politically motivated service provision by local bureaucrats. Second, we propose a research design for an observational test of this theory using a close elections regression discontinuity design (RDD). Comparing the subsequent electoral performance of narrowly elected police-union backed District Attorney’s to narrowly elected police-union opposed District Attorney’s allows us to identify conditionally exogenous politically motivated service provision. In turn, we will use these RDDs to estimate how voters update their views of candidates in the face of bureaucratic resistance shirking. Broadly, these results will speak to important questions about bureaucratic accountability and political control.
