When Electoral Responsiveness Harms Voters: Evidence from Electoral Pollution Cycles in Mexican Municipalities

Abstract

Can electoral responsiveness harm voters, and if so, when? Most of the literature on electoral responsiveness rightly argues that voters support policies that bring about immediate positive outcomes. In this paper, we theorize a set of circumstances under which politicians’ pursuit of voters’ preferred policy can also have immediate adverse consequences for voters. We provide evidence of the effect of electoral incentives on a critical type of public good—air quality—in a young, developing democracy—Mexico. By leveraging the exogeneity of the local electoral calendar, we find that state governors can be particularly incentivized to improve public welfare perceivable to the voters during the election, but sacrifice air quality and inadvertently harm public health in both the short and long terms. We call this phenomenon an “electoral pollution cycle.” We show that regulatory forbearance, rather than economic boom, around the election most likely explains the phenomenon. We argue that the electoral pollution cycle can impose significant human costs. This paper contributes to the study of the welfare consequences of electoral incentives in democracies. It also sheds light on how voters could fail to internalize the tradeoff between different forms of welfare improvement in the short run.