Polarization and Responsiveness in Local Legislatures in the United States

Evidence on growing partisan polarization in the federal and state governments points to problems for the health of democratic governing and representation. Yet there has been little work done on polarization in local governments, despite their large number and substantive importance for the daily experiences of citizens. We develop the most comprehensive study to date on polarization and representation in local legislatures using original data on roll call votes in over 1,000 cities and counties. We estimate local legislators' ideal points and combine them with granular data on local elections and constituents' partisan preferences.  We find that local legislators' voting behavior is correlated with the partisanship of their constituents. This highlights an important mechanism for previous work showing that local policy is correlated with the mass public's ideological views. Next, we compare polarization levels across jurisdictions using a scale-free measure of cross-party versus within-party polarization. We show that local legislatures are much less polarized across party lines than state legislatures and Congress in their voting behavior, though local polarization is growing over time. We also examine how institutions affect polarization and representation in local legislatures. We find that places with partisan elections are more polarized than places with nonpartisan elections. Overall, our results extend previous theories on legislative polarization and representation to the local level and challenge longstanding folk wisdom motivating local institutional choices.