Does Changing Mayors Matter?

Abstract

In this article we examine the effect of leadership change on public policy at the urban level. We ask whether cities in which elections result in mayoral change experience changes in public policy that differ from those of cities in which incumbents are reelected. We employ change in real per capita operating expenditures and changes in expenditure shares (priorities) as measures of public policy (although they are only two among many) and include in our analysis the universe of U.S. cities with population in excess of 100,000 for the years 1974 to 1985. We hypothesize that mayoral change will have a greater policy effect in cities where facilitative structures (i.e., mayor-council systems) exist than in cities with nonfacilitative structures (i.e., council-manager systems). We make comparisons between expenditure changes and priorities for incumbent and new mayors, employing both simple descriptive and multivariate analyses which controls for other factors that influence expenditure change. We conclude that in general new mayors changed spending more than did incumbents, and although differences are small, at least with respect to the measure of policy change we employ, changing mayors did matter.