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Public Pensions and the Transformation of Local Government
Sarah Anzia, Associate Professor of Public Policy & Political Science, UC Berkeley
Abstract: In the last decade, some experts have sounded the alarm about rising public-employee pension costs in the United States, claiming that dramatic increases in local governments’ pension expenditures are crowding out government services—to the detriment of the communities most reliant on them. Others have maintained that serious pension problems are limited to a few places and do not pose an existential threat to U.S. local government. Despite the importance of this issue, no existing studies — nor the datasets they rely on — allow evaluation of whether local pension expenditures are rising or how they are affecting local government. Analyzing new data collected from the annual financial reports of hundreds of cities, counties, and school districts, I find that local governments’ pension expenditures did rise in real terms almost everywhere between 2005 and 2016 — but that there is significant variation in that growth. Also, local governments are generally not responding to their rising pension costs by increasing revenue (except, to some degree, school districts). They are instead shrinking their workforces. Moreover, the magnitude of the employment reductions due to rising pension costs varies with key features of the political and institutional environment and is more pronounced for certain categories of local employees. Notably, local governments’ responses to rising pension costs are not related to local citizens’ ideology and partisanship in the ways some might expect.
Sarah Anzia is a political scientist who studies American politics with a focus on state and local government, elections, interest groups, political parties, and public policy. Her first book, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2014), examines how the timing of elections can be manipulated to affect both voter turnout and the composition of the electorate, which, in turn, affects election outcomes and public policy. She has a second book forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments, which evaluates the political activity of interest groups in US local governments and how interest groups shape local policies on housing, business tax incentives, policing, and public service provision more broadly. She has also written about the political activity and influence of public-sector unions, the politics of public pensions, policy feedback, women in politics, political parties, and the historical development of electoral institutions. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and Studies in American Political Development. She has a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and an M.P.P. from the Harris School at the University of Chicago.
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