Intergovernmental alignment and the electoral value of mayors: reverse coattails in an unexpected technocracy

Abstract

Although parties are documented to invest significant amounts of resources towards strengthening their hold on local governments, whether mayors benefit their parties in national elections remains an open question. More specifically, it is unclear if mayors are electorally valuable in periods when party-affiliated central governments do not support them via politically discriminatory policies. We address this gap by studying “reverse coattails” in a unique setting: under a technocratic central government instituted following an unexpected, exogenous tragic event that forced the previous government’s resignation. Investigating close mayoral races in Romania in a regression discontinuity analysis, we find that local incumbency generated meaningful vote share premiums in the 2016 parliamentary elections. Exploring the underlying mechanism, we retrieve evidence for prospective voting, suggesting that the reverse coattails we document are partially driven by voters’ expectations of future preferential resource allocations by the central government. We show that preferential central policies were implemented after, but not before the national elections, and find that reverse coattails were stronger in constituencies where funds received from the center are an important component of local revenues.