Land use policy: institutional design and the responsiveness of representative government. Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting

We study how features of local political institutions affect the responsiveness of local governments to changing social, economic, and political circumstances. We develop a theory of institutional responsiveness that allows us to understand the capacity of local governments to respond to changing preferences for public policies. We then describe a two-stage empirical model that captures many of the insights of the theory. We use this empirical model to test hypotheses about changing preferences for land use policies in a sample of California cities. The model first specifies demand for land use restrictions as a function of local demographic, geographic, and economic factors. We interpret the predicted value from this regression as a community’s “baseline ” policy, independent of (actually, averaging over) the effects of specific institutions. We then estimate the marginal effect of institutional characteristics on policy outcomes. Our analyses have important implications for our understanding of political stability. They help us understand when existing local political institutions will have the capacity to adapt to changing policy preferences, and when advocates of policy change will have no option but to change the political institutions themselves. As such, our research has important implications for understanding the trade-offs between institutional design, stability, responsiveness, and change