Local Improvement Districts and Democratic Participation

A significant amount of literature has inspected the relationship between public-private partnerships (PPPs) and state and local government. This literature has focused primarily on how these agreements shape financing, economic development, and public policy measures. There has been no research thus far, however, on how these PPPs may affect civic engagement and democratic participation at the state and local level. There are many reasons to believe that PPPs may raise levels of civic engagement and democratic participation, as they deeply affect state and local politics and shape the socioeconomic development of local communities. This paper fills this gap in the literature by exploring the relationship between the establishment of local improvement districts, a form of public-private partnership, and voter participation rates. An original data set is constructed from 18 state assembly districts and 22 local improvement districts in New York City across nine elections between 2002 and 2018. This paper shows that, even after controlling for differences in income, education, and race across the 18 assembly districts, there is a significant relationship between the establishment of an improvement district in a community and an increase in electoral participation rates. These findings are compelling, providing insight into the role that improvement districts, and PPPs more broadly, play in the political development of communities and opening a new path in the existing literature that can continue to be built upon.