Is it better to have a more educated mayor?

It seems somewhat self-evident that having a more educated mayor would be better than having a less educated mayor. However, whether education is a positive attribute for a mayor really depends on whether, and to what extent, more educated mayors act differently than less educated mayors. Do they spend more, or less? How do they spend the public budget?

This new article by Alessio Mitra (University of Kent), published in the European Journal of Political Economy (ungated earlier version here) directly addresses the second question - how does mayoral education affect public finance? Mitra uses data from municipal elections in Italy over the period from 2000 to 2015, focusing on municipalities with a population of less than 15,000 (because larger municipalities use different electoral rules). He defines a more educated mayoral candidate as one with a university degree, and a less educated mayoral candidate as one without a degree.

Mitra applies a regression discontinuity design (RDD), which involves comparing municipalities that narrowly elected a more educated mayoral candidate over a less educated candidate with similar municipalities where the more educated candidate lost to the less educated candidate. In very close elections, the identity of the winner is plausibly as-good-as random, provided there is no manipulation around the threshold related to the education of the candidates. In other words, since the difference between getting 50.01 percent of the vote and getting 49.99 percent of the vote is essentially random, the education of the winning mayoral candidate is basically determined randomly in these close elections between candidates with different education levels. With that assumption in mind, observed differences between the municipalities where a more educated candidate won with those where they lost can be attributed to the difference in mayoral education.

Mitra's dataset includes more than 18,000 mayoral elections, of which 1211 have a margin of victory of less than five percent (which he defines as a close election, and includes in the analysis). He looks at the differences in public expenditure, initially focusing on changes in the share of spending devoted to operational expenses (or 'current expenditure' as he terms it) or public investment. In this, Mitra finds that:

When an educated mayor is elected by chance, public investment rises by 3 percentage points of total expenditure compared to a less educated counterpart.

Digging down into the allocation of that public investment, he finds that:

...educated mayors allocate an additional 1 percentage point of total expenditure to education investment, accounting for one-third of the overall increase in public investment.

And going a bit deeper than that:

Among education investments, immovable assets dedicated to nurseries receive the largest increase in resources.

Consistent with Italy’s balanced budget requirement on municipalities, there is no significant change in fiscal deficit. That means that the additional spending devoted to public investment must mean a corresponding reduction in operational expenditure. Mitra doesn't really dig into that at all.

What we take away from this paper is that more educated mayors devote more spending to education. In the Waikato Economics Discussion Group today, we discussed what mechanisms might underlie this difference, which is something that Mitra didn't explore. Perhaps more educated mayors see more value in education. After all, they invested more in their own education than a less educated mayor did. However, that's not entirely consistent with spending more on public investment in early childhood education.

A second possibility is that more educated mayors have a lower intrinsic discount rate, increasing their willingness to make long-term investments, both in their own education and in the education of their citizens. This is more consistent with devoting spending to public investment in early childhood education.

A third possibility is that more educated mayors may be better at the administration of public investment, such as project approvals, capital budgeting, grants, or procurement. This means that they have greater capacity for public investment projects. However, that greater capacity wouldn't necessarily be more apparent for public investment in education, or early childhood investment.

However, an intriguing but speculative fourth possibility is that more educated mayors understand that public investment can be used strategically to affect demographics. Many municipalities in Italy are facing extreme population ageing and/or declining populations. Mitigating (but probably not reversing) those population changes may be possible through creative policy. If the municipality invests in early childhood education, that may make the municipality more attractive for young parents to relocate to, and may reduce cost pressures that hamper fertility. The problem with this as an explanation is that it isn't clear that these trends and policy solution would be more apparent to a more educated mayor than to a less educated one.

The second possibility seems to me like the most promising. However, exploring the reasons why more educated mayors spend more on public investment, particularly in education, is a promising exercise for future research.

One last point is that the effects are actually quite modest. The total budget for a municipality of 15,000 population would be around €15-25 million per year (based in part on this and this, both in Italian, but see also here for public finance data for all Italian municipalities). A reallocation of three percentage points to public investment represents up to an additional €750,000 per year. And if one-third of that is spent on public investment in education, that is an additional €250,000 per year. It's not nothing, but it's certainly not building multiple new schools. Maybe it's an additional small school building per year.

So, is it better to have a more educated mayor? This research suggests yes, but that relies on a normative view that more spending on public investment, particularly in education, is overall a good thing. However, the size of the effect doesn't suggest transformational change, and we don't really know what the trade-offs are in terms of what categories of operational spending were reduced. A university degree does not necessarily make someone a better mayor, and this paper cannot tell us whether more educated mayors have better preferences, longer time horizons, or simply greater administrative capacity. What it does show is that who gets elected can change not just how much is spent, but what kind of future a municipality chooses to invest in.

Exposure to conflict and support for democracy in Africa

Does being exposed to conflict, whether violent conflict or protests, increase or decrease people's support for democracy? That is the question that is addressed in this new article by Nicole Stoelinga (Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics) and Tuuli Tähtinen (University of Munich), published in the journal World Development (open access).

Stoelinga and Tähtinen have a quite innovative approach to identifying the answer to that question. They exploit the timing of data collection from the Afrobarometer survey, comparing research participants who were surveyed in the two weeks before a conflict event in their region with research participants who were surveyed in the two weeks after the event, in terms of their support for democracy and perceptions of the extent of democracy in their country. Controlling for other characteristics of the research participants, in theory any difference in support for democracy or perceived extent of democracy between those surveyed before, and those surveyed after, the conflict event should arise as a result of the conflict. This of course relies on survey timing around the conflict event being 'as good as random' (more on that later).

Their data covers up to 38 countries (the exact number varies across waves of the Afrobarometer survey) over the period from 2002 to 2021. Their conflict data comes from ACLED, and distinguishes between 'violent conflict events', which include "battles, explosions/remote violence, and violence against civilians", and 'demonstrations', which include protests and riots. Their dataset includes over 24,000 observations for violent conflict events, and over 42,000 observations for demonstrations. In their main results, they find that:

...conflict has a positive impact on support for democracy. The point estimates indicate that on average, a conflict event in one’s region increases the probability of support for democracy over other forms of governance by 2 percentage points. Exposure to violent events and exposure to protests have very similar impacts. In contrast, individuals’ perceptions of governance in their own country are not significantly affected by conflict exposure.

That seems to me to be a quite surprising result - exposure to conflict increases the support for democracy. Stoelinga and Tähtinen then dig a little deeper, looking at the difference in results between members of an ethnic in-group (which is an ethnic group that is 'represented in government', meaning that it governs alone or shares power), and members of an ethnic out-group. In this analysis, they find that:

The point estimates are imprecisely estimated, but suggest that exposure to violence increases support for democracy among out-group members, while the point estimate of similar magnitude and opposite sign suggests no effect among in-group members.

When they say that the estimates are 'imprecisely estimated', they mean that they are statistically insignificant. However, in terms of perceptions of democracy in the country, Stoelinga and Tähtinen find that:

...exposure to violence has a significant positive impact on individuals’ perceptions of governance in their own country.

That result holds for both the in-group and the out-group. Demonstrations have no effect on perceptions of democracy for either group. Stoelinga and Tähtinen interpret these results as showing a 'rally around the flag' effect, where people exposed to violent conflict show greater support for their leaders. Stoelinga and Tähtinen provide further evidence in support of this 'rally around the flag' effect by looking at trust in institutions, finding that:

...exposure to violent events significantly increases trust in president and ruling party, as well as in the police and army—but significantly less for the in-group than for the out-group.

Stoelinga and Tähtinen then turn to looking at differences in results between more autocratic and more democratic regimes, finding that:

In autocracies, exposure to either violence or protests increases both support for democracy and the perceived extent of democracy. Conversely, in democratic countries, conflict exposure does not have a significant impact on democratic preferences, although the point estimates suggest that the perceived extent of democracy is negatively affected...

In autocracies, exposure to violence generally increases trust in key political institutions, particularly in president and ruling party, as well as in the army... In democracies, the effects of conflict exposure on trust are less pronounced. Although mostly lacking statistical significance, the estimates point towards both violence and protests having negative effects on trust.

In other words, the 'rally around the flag' effect is a feature of autocracies and not of democracies. That should worry advocates for democracy who might hope that popular movements, which may be characterised by protests or riots, and may occasionally escalate into violent conflict events, might lead to regime change. Instead, the results in this paper suggest that conflict events increase support for democracy, but also increase trust in autocratic governments, and so may be counterproductive. Stoelinga and Tähtinen suggest that this may explain the lack of democratic transitions in Africa. To that, I would add that a similar mechanism may also explain Tunisia slipping back towards authoritarianism in recent years, despite the Arab Spring uprising.

Now, it should be noted that these results could be sensitive to the research design. If conflict events change the way that data collection activities are conducted, or change the locations of data collection, then that would confound the effects of conflict on support for democracy. For instance, if the Afrobarometer survey was originally scheduled for Region A, but that region is affected by conflict and instead they shift to Region B, which is less affected, that might bias the results in exactly the direction that Stoelinga and Tähtinen observe - towards more positive views towards democracy, if those who are less affected by conflict have greater support for democracy. Stoelinga and Tähtinen are upfront about the potential invalidity of their results arising from endogenous change in the timing or location of survey data collection. However, they argue that, because there are no observable differences in research participants before and after the conflict event, there is no problem. That doesn't address whether there are unobservable differences between research participants before and after the conflict event though.

Another issue with the research design is that conflict events don't suddenly arise out of nowhere, so the 'control group' of research participants surveyed before the conflict event may already have experienced some of the antecedents to the conflict event, such as growing tensions and uncertainty. That would have an ambiguous impact on the results of this study.

So, we should not treat these results as the last word on this research question. The paper provides a surprising and counterintuitive finding, that conflict may increase support for democracy, but in autocracies it may also strengthen trust in government institutions. That complicates the appealing idea that protest or conflict will naturally push autocratic countries in Africa towards democratic transition.