Does Local Politics Matter? Quasi-experimental Evidence from Italian Municipal Elections

Do differently oriented political parties implement radically divergent policies which impact the citizens’s welfare? The overheated political debate notwithstanding, it is far from clear if this is really the case. Whereas current literature on this issue narrows the focus on specific policy outcomes and instruments, we use the real estate market to evaluate the impact of the whole spectrum of municipal policies. Using a novel dataset on Italian municipal elections for the years 2003–2011 and the corresponding changes in real estate market prices, we employ a regression discontinuity approach to detect the causal effect of a change in municipal majorities. We find robust evidence of no difference between the effects of the policies enacted by left-wing and right-wing parties after three, four, and five years since the election.