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

Can electoral responsiveness hurt voters? In contrast to the existing literature on voter support for policies with immediate positive outcomes, we theorize conditions under which politicians’ pursuit of voters’ preferred policy can also have immediate adverse consequences for voter welfare. Leveraging the exogeneity of the local electoral calendar, we find that state governors in Mexico are particularly incentivized to sacrifice a critical type of public good—air quality—and inadvertently harm public health in election years. The “electoral pollution cycle” is particularly prominent when the level of electoral competition is high. The phenomenon is explained by regulatory forbearance rather than economic growth. It unveils how voters could fail to internalize the tradeoff between different forms of welfare improvement. Juxtaposed with the work on political pollution cycles in China by Shen (2018), this paper suggests that democracies and autocracies may be less different in public goods provision than previously thought