Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, gave a talk at Herbst Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 30, to showcase some research from his upcoming book, titled “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (In American Cities): How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable.”
Benedictis-Kessner started off by showcasing how over the years, state and federal government support has fallen, yet local government support has kept steady for decades. Even though some urban public services — like public transport — that are administered by local governments are substandard. Benedictis-Kessner uses the example of Boston’s public transport, highlighting the fact that wait times for trains reach up to 20 minutes, yet Bostonians will happily re-elect their incumbents for mayor and city council.
Next, Benedictis-Kessner presented some key findings from his book. He concluded that city elections aren’t competitive. Voters elect their leaders based on visible problems i.e. roads and homelessness. And a “fog of accountability,” as he calls it, exists that shrouds voter knowledge on more complex policy areas. Such a concept may arise from poor media coverage of policies or complex governance and overlapping jurisdictions.
The relationship between politicians and voters is tied by policy, as politicians will present policy to prospective voters, who will essentially vote that policy into office. A citizen’s ability to vote is a strong tool they can use to keep politicians in check. But a citizen’s low knowledge of politics and politicians who will lay the blame on anyone else but themselves, make it harder to make a vote meaningful.
Benedictis-Kessner showcased a “fog of accountability” graph, which had the complexity of a matter — like crime, police, roads or schooling — on the y-axis and the amount of information available to voters on the x-axis. Matters like road quality can be easily evaluated by citizens as they can look outside and judge some roads. Issues like crime could be a lot harder to evaluate for a citizen, though, as constant media coverage of crime can make one believe there is a crisis of crime happening on their streets, even if the opposite is true.
Benedictis-Kessner talked about the effects of the “voter knowledge deficit” on elections, which is the problem of voters having little to no knowledge on what local government does. A graph showcased the relationship between survey results that asked people to grade the road quality in their own cities, with the percentage of people who voted for the incumbent in local elections. There is little to no correlation between better road quality and an increase in vote share, as the line was basically flat.
The story changed when Benedictis-Kessner split the graph into two, between those with low and high political knowledge. In the low political knowledge graph, there is little to no correlation between road quality and a change in voting, in the high political knowledge graph, there is a positive correlation between road quality and a change in voting, showing that the people with low political knowledge may be a strong factor in keeping incumbents in office, even if the road quality hasn’t increased.
Benedictis-Kessner next exhibited how foggy areas, like crime, require help for the voter to understand the problem at hand. He used the example of Chesa Boudin, the former San Fransisco Defense Attorney who got recalled in 2022 because voters believed the recent surge of crime can be tied to Boudin’s progressive ideals on prosecution. Benedictis-Kessner argued that Mayor London Breed should have been the person to recall instead of Boudin, as she is responsible for appointing the police chief. But media coverage about crime in San Fransisco mentioned Boudin’s name a lot more than they did Breed, so people associated Boudin with the rise in crime.
Benedictis-Kessner displayed another graph highlighting the relationship between increases and decreases in crime and incumbent vote share, finding little to no correlation between them.
While the correlation is low overall, the story does change in regard to the amount of media coverage of crime. In cities with high media coverage, like New York, the mayor gets blamed for rising crime in media headlines. Another example can be found in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where a quote from the mayor is included, admonishing the crime mentioned.
Yet, in cities with low media coverage of crime like Las Vegas, no such thing happens. In cities with high media coverage of crime, the coverage can affect the amount of votes an incumbent could get, they won’t lose the election, but their majority will be a lot smaller. The same effect is found in city council elections too. No such effect is found in cities with low media coverage. One more overarching factor that affects the amount of crime news stations could cover is the “Sinclair Effect” where local news stations get bought up by television conglomerate Sinclair, and seemingly do less coverage on crime than non-Sinclair stations do.
Julia Stout, a seventh-semester human rights and political science major, came to the talk because of a professor who had told her about it. Stout commented that with all the graphs and data showed during the talk, “it definitely made me think about data sets and just how much research he had to do, which is pretty impressive.” She mentioned Benedictis-Kessner’s dataset that he used to conduct the research, which took him around 10 years to build and has over 60,000 local election results since 1990.
Benedictis-Kessner rounded out his presentation by summarizing two key points: Voters like city governments, but not their cities; and voters have a “fog of accountability” that clouds their judgement on key topics.