Timing and Turnout takes us deep into the mechanics of local elections. At first glance that task might seem small, inconsequential, and appealing only to a select group of urban academics. But it would be a big mistake to dismiss this book on first glance. Timing and Turnout deals with local elections but it is fundamentally about representation and responsiveness—two of the most debated topics in politics today and two concepts that we should all care deeply about.
In Timing and Turnout, Sarah Anzia asks us to consider what the effects of election timing are for American democracy. The book begins by highlighting one of the core failures of our democracy—our inability to get Americans to the polls. This is especially true at the local level where “voter turnout rates of 20%, 10%, or even lower are common” (p. 1). But as Professor Anzia critically notes, those average figures belie tremendous variation—even in the same location. In Palo Alto, California, for example, she notes that turnout in city elections dropped from an impressive 82 percent in 2008 to a dismal 38 percent in 2009. What explains these enormous shifts in participation in the same place? Election timing. The 2008 contest was held on the same day as the Presidential contest, while the 2009 election was held off-cycle.
If election timing can so radically alter who votes, what else can it do? That is essentially the project of the book. Does election timing impact election results? Does it shift policy outcomes? And equally importantly, how did all of this get to be in the first place? Or put more concretely, who decides when elections will be held?
Before embarking on what is very much an empirical tour de force, Anzia offers some compelling theoretical insights into these questions. Her theory is intuitive but also wholly innovative. She argues that those that have a large stake in an election outcome should turn out to vote at higher rates than others and that any turnout gap should grow larger as the difficulty of voting increases. Effectively that means that organized interests like teachers’ and municipal workers’ unions who have a clear stake in local elections should dominate when those contests are low turnout off-cycle elections and should hold substantially less sway when those contests are higher turnout on-cycle elections. Put more succinctly, democracy will reflect narrow interest groups preferences in off-cycle elections and will be much more likely to represent the interests of the broader public in higher turnout on-cycle contests.
That makes sense but is it in fact true? Here is where Timing and Turnout really shines. Anzia’s analysis of the effects of election timing is thorough and absolutely compelling. One chapter details the relationship between school board election timing and teacher salaries across eight states. Another section demonstrates the same relationship by focusing on variation in election timing and turnout within a single state. And yet another chapter tests the effects of timing on municipal employee salaries. What is impressive about the tests is the keen attention to the endogeneity of election timing. Often we see the effects of election timing after considering an impressive array of controls, including controls for the strength of teachers’ unions in each district and the pre-existing political ideology of residents in the district. Even more telling is Anzia’s leveraging of a quasi-experiment in Texas where some types of school districts were forced to move to on-cycle elections while others were not. By using district level fixed effects and comparing changes in policy in districts that were forced to change and those that were not, the book provides a clean causal estimate of the effects of timing. All of this demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt that off-cycle elections lead to a distressing distortion of democracy.
Importantly, Anzia does not just look at the present. She goes back in time to help us understand the origins of our flawed democracy. Here the book provides a persuasive accounting of how off-cycle elections came to be in the first place by documenting the frequent efforts of political parties to change the timing of local elections. By digging deep into the history of three major American cities and unearthing detailed election returns, Anzia is able to show how political parties consistently tried to manipulate election timing to their own advantage. Professor Anzia shows that this pattern is still evident today; through an analysis of state legislative bills on election timing that were introduced between 2001 and 2011 she finds clear partisan differences and the same efforts to alter election timing for political advantage.
There are some things that Timing and Turnout does not do. It does little to examine variation in the effect of timing across different levels of political offices. In the book we find that off-cycle elections at the school board level favor unions but others like myself have found that off-cycle elections at the city level favor more conservative, white voters. How can we explain these differences? One might also expect that the effects of off-cycle elections would depend on the partisan or political persuasion of a locality. In cities that are overwhelmingly Democratic or overwhelmingly Republican we might see few effects but in places that are more heterogeneous we might find particularly stark effects. And finally, one might want to look at the effect of timing on different outcomes. Although Timing and Turnout examines important policy outcomes, it ignores other equally important ones like minority representation, social spending, and the distribution of spending and services across different types of neighborhoods—all of which might also be linked to election timing.
Despite these ongoing questions, the lessons are clear. Timing is not a boring bureaucratic matter. Instead in this impressive book we learn that election timing is better understood as a tool to determine who has an advantage in the electoral process, a tool to sway policy outcomes, and more broadly, a tool to help determine who wins and who loses in local democracy. All of this makes Timing and Turnout not only an important addition to the literature on urban politics and American politics, but also a call to action for political reformers.
At the end of the day the basic facts outlined in the book are troubling. Some 70 percent of Americans favor holding local elections on the same day as national contests. Yet across the country, the vast majority of localities continue to hold off-cycle elections. An electoral institution that is widely unpopular, that effectively deters a third of the electorate from going to the polls, and that is essentially hijacking democracy is still the norm in this country.
Fortunately reform may be possible. There is a growing movement to alter election timing around the country. Voters in Los Angeles and several other cities around the country have voted to shift to on-cycle elections. The legislatures in Arizona and California have made similar moves in recent years. Hopefully with the publication of this book, more will heed the call.
