Road maintenance over the local election cycle

Despite recognition that government officials have politically motivated incentives to pursue new infrastructure construction at the expense of infrastructure upkeep, no prior research directly addresses how political incentives affect road maintenance separate from road construction. This paper investigates how local political incentives affect local road maintenance using unique data on completed road maintenance projects and difference-in-differences which leverages exogenous timing of mayoral elections. Since residents complain about damaged roads and can also be frustrated by travel delays caused by road maintenance, it is theoretically ambiguous how elected officials manipulate road maintenance, assuming they do so for political purposes. We show local election cycles shift road maintenance timing and location. We provide evidence that maintenance follows different patterns in mayoral election years and that maintenance is shifted around sub-city geographic units based on those units’ political similarity of registered voters. A mayoral election costs $90,623 in additional road-related costs, translating to $28,093,182 per election for large cities.