Barry Burden, David Canon, Stephane Lavertu, Ken Mayer, and Donald Moynihan have posted this paper. (Thanks to Ned Foley for the pointer.) Here’s the abstract:
The method by which we select public officials can have a significant effect on their incentives, the constraints they face, and ultimately the policy goals they pursue. We explore this phenomenon using election administration as a case. We examine differences in the policy preferences among elected and appointed election officials, and explore the relationship between those attitudes and the administrative outcomes they may engender. We employ a uniquely rich dataset that includes the survey responses of over 1,200 Wisconsin election officials, structured interviews with dozens of these officials, and data from the 2008 presidential election. Drawing upon a natural experiment in how clerks are selected, we find that elected officials support policies that emphasize voter access rather than ballot security, and that their municipalities are associated with higher voter turnout. For appointed officials, we find that voter turnout in a municipality is noticeably lower when the local election official’s partisanship differs from the partisanship of the electorate. Overall, our results support the notion that selection methods, and the incentives that flow from those methods, matter a great deal. Elected officials are more likely to express attitudes and generate outcomes that reflect their direct exposure to voters, in contrast to the more insulated position of appointed officials.
As I’ve argued here (and, at greater length, in this article and a forthcoming ELJ article that draws on the work of Dan Lowenstein), party-affiliated election officials face an inherent conflict of interest. But until now, there’s been little research on exactly how selection methods affect local election administrators’ decisionmaking. This paper appears to be an important contribution to the debate over whether and how to reform the institutions that runs American elections.