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Does Property Ownership Lead to Participation in Local Politics? Evidence from Property Records and Meeting Minutes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2020

JESSE YODER Open the ORCID record for JESSE YODER [Opens in a new window]
JESSE YODER*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Jesse Yoder, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, yoderj@stanford.edu.
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Abstract

Homeowners and renters have participated in politics at different rates throughout American history, but does becoming a property owner motivate an individual to participate in local politics? I combine deed-level property records in California and Texas with an original dataset on individual comments in local city council meetings to study the role of property ownership in shaping costly forms of political behavior, and I document large inequalities in who participates at city council meetings. I also link property records to individual-level contribution records and administrative voter files and find that becoming a property owner increases an individual’s political activity. Over and above voting in local elections, property ownership motivates individuals to participate in local city council meetings and donate to candidates. These findings illustrate how the experience of homeownership leads property owners to become much more active in local politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 1213 - 1229
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

For comments and suggestions, the author thanks Katie Einstein, Justin Grimmer, Andy Hall, Zhao Li, Zac Peskowitz, Dan Thompson, Matt Tyler, and participants in Stanford’s Democracy and Polarization Lab meetings, the 2019 Midwest Political Science Association conference, and the 2019 American Political Science Association conference. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RDIJQC.

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