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. She is the author of Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which evaluates the political activity of interest groups in US local governments and how interest groups shape local public policies on housing, business tax incentives, policing, and public service provision more broadly.
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 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, and other scholarly journals. She has a PhD in political science from Stanford University and an MPP from the Harris School at the University of Chicago.
Contact and Office Hours
Office 2607 Hearst, Room 301
Office Hours
Monday (location: GSPP) and Wednesday (location: SSB), 11:00 am to 12:00 pm (sign up here)
About
Areas of Expertise
- Democracy Policy
- American politics
- Local politics and policy
- State politics and policy
- Interest groups
- Public-sector unions
- Public-employee pensions
- Women in politics
Curriculum Vitae
Other Affiliations
- Professor, Travers Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley
- Senior Fellow, Niskanen Center
- Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution
Research
Working Papers
Civil Service Adoption in America: The Political Influence of City Employees
Working Paper (May 2023)
At the turn of the 20th century, most cities in America featured a patronage-based system of governance, but over the next few decades, patronage was replaced by civil service. Civil service restructured the relationship between elected officials and government employees, with employees benefiting from a variety of new protections. Yet in studying this change, scholars have largely ignored the role local employees themselves might have played in the transformation. We argue that city employees stood to benefit from civil service, and in places where they had agency and clout, they were important drivers of its adoption. We collected a dataset for more than 1,000 municipal governments, determining whether and when they adopted civil service and whether their employees were organized in an occupational organization. Our analysis of these new data shows the influence of city employees was an important contributor to the spread of civil service in American local government.
Selected Publications
Does Receiving Government Assistance Shape Political Attitudes? Evidence from Agricultural Producers
Anzia, Sarah F., Jake Alton Jares, and Neil Malhotra. Forthcoming. “Does Receiving Government Assistance Shape Political Attitudes? Evidence from Agricultural Producers.” American Political Science Review.
When individuals receive benefits from government programs, does it affect their attitudes toward those programs, or toward government generally? A growing literature blends policy feedback theory and political behavior research to explore these questions, but so far it has focused almost exclusively on social policies such as the Affordable Care Act. In this article, we focus on a very different set of government programs that reach a more conservative, rural population: agricultural assistance. Our study ties administrative records on participation in USDA farm aid programs to an original, first-of-its-kind survey measuring agricultural producers’ political attitudes. We find that receiving agricultural assistance is sometimes related to producers’ views of the program delivering the benefits, but it depends on the divisiveness of the program and—for highly partisan programs—recipients’ ideology. However, receiving federal agricultural assistance is not associated with more positive views of government.
Gender Stereotyping and the Electoral Success of Women Candidates: New Evidence from Local Elections in the United States
Anzia, Sarah F., and Rachel Bernhard. Forthcoming. “How Does Gender Stereotyping Affect Women Candidates? New Evidence from Local Elections in California.” British Journal of Political Science.
Research shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, which should help women in some electoral contexts and hurt them in others. Yet most research examines a single context at a time—usually U.S. national elections, where partisanship is strong—and employs surveys and experiments, raising concerns that citizens’ responses may not reflect how they actually vote. By analyzing returns from thousands of nonpartisan local elections, we test whether patterns of women’s win rates relative to men’s match expectations for how the electoral effects of gender stereotyping should vary by context. We find women have greater advantages over men in city council than mayoral races, still greater advantages in school board races, and decreasing advantages in more conservative constituencies. Thus, women fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. These effects are most pronounced during on-cycle elections, when voters tend to know less about local candidates.
Party and Ideology in American Local Government: An Appraisal
Anzia. Sarah F. 2021. “Party and Ideology in American Local Government: An Appraisal.” Annual Review of Political Science 24: 133-150.
For decades, research on U.S. local politics emphasized the distinctiveness of local government, but that has begun to change. In recent years, new data on partisanship and ideology have transformed the study of local politics. Much of the ensuing scholarship has concluded that local politics resembles politics in state and national governments: partisan and ideological. I argue that such a conclusion is premature. So far, this newer literature has been insufficiently attentive to the policies U.S. local governments make—and that they are mostly different from the issues that dominate national politics. Going forward, scholars should prioritize measurement of preferences on these local government issues. They should develop theories of when and why local political divisions will mirror national partisanship and ideology. And they should investigate why there are links between some local policies and national partisanship and ideology—and whether those links also exist for core local government issues.
Pensions in the Trenches: How Pension Spending is Affecting U.S. Local Government
Anzia, Sarah F. Forthcoming. “Pensions in the Trenches: How Pension Spending is Affecting U.S. Local Government.” Urban Affairs Review.
Some experts claim that U.S. local governments are experiencing dramatic increases in pension expenditures and that pension spending is crowding out government services. Others maintain that serious pension problems are limited. This issue is important to political scientists, urban scholars, and policy practitioners, but no existing studies—nor the datasets they rely on— allow evaluation of whether pension expenditures are rising or how they are affecting local government. This article analyzes a new dataset of the annual pension expenditures of over 400 municipalities and counties from 2005 to 2016. I find that pension expenditures rose almost everywhere over this period, but there is significant variation in that growth. On average, local governments are not responding to rising pension spending by increasing revenue. They are instead shrinking their workforces. Moreover, I find that the magnitude of the employment reductions due to pensions varies with key features of the political environment.
Interest Groups on the Inside: The Governance of Public Pension Funds
Anzia, Sarah F., and Terry M. Moe. 2019. “Interest Groups on the Inside: The Governance of Public Pension Funds.” Perspectives on Politics 17(4): 1059-1078
New scholarship in American politics argues that interest groups should be brought back to the center of the field. We attempt to further that agenda by exploring an aspect of group influence that has been little studied: the role interest groups play on the inside of government as official participants in bureaucratic decision-making. The challenges for research are formidable, but a fuller understanding of group influence in American politics requires that they be taken on. Here we carry out an exploratory analysis that focuses on the bureaucratic boards that govern public pensions. These are governance structures of enormous financial consequence for state governments, public workers, and taxpayers. They also make decisions that are quantitative (and comparable) in nature, and they usually grant official policymaking authority to a key interest group: public employees and their unions. Our analysis suggests that “interest groups on the inside” do have influence—in ways that weaken effective government. Going forward, scholars should devote greater attention to how insider roles vary across agencies and groups, how groups exercise influence in these ways, how different governance structures shape their policy effects, and what it all means for our understanding of interest groups in American politics.
In the News
Articles and Op-Eds
Missouri's unfair election rules stack the deck against Ferguson's black residents
The Washington Post, August 29, 2014
Media Citations
The Odd Timing of City Elections in New York
The New York Times, September 7, 2017
Webcasts
Women in Politics, Public Pensions and Voter Turnout with Sarah Anzia
Sarah Anzia, Henry E. Brady,
Date: May 8, 2017 Duration: 27 minutes
Surreal Politics: How Anxiety About Race, Gender and Inequality is Shaping the Presidential Campaign
Sarah Anzia, Henry E. Brady, Jack Glaser, Jonathan Stein, Maria Echaveste (Moderator),
Date: October 5, 2016 Duration: 56 minutes
National Study of Local Government Pension Costs, 2005-2016
For this research project, I gathered the annual financial reports of roughly 800 local governments from 2005 to 2016, including municipal governments, counties, school districts, and special districts. I used information in the reports to document how much each local government spent on its employees’ pensions each year. This dataset allows us to see what local governments are actually spending on their employees' pensions and how that has changed over time--not just in the places with the biggest problems, but in a large, diverse set of local governments. I have also compiled annual data on local finances and employment from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Governments (SOG) for the same years.
Please note the following: These data on local government pension costs track what the local governments actually spent on pensions from 2005 to 2016, not what they should have been spending. They also do not track the funding ratios of local governments' pension plans.
A detailed description of the data collection is available here.
The data produced from this project are available below. They include (1) the database of local government CAFRs, (2) datasets at the level of the local government, pension plan, and year--one each for municipal governments, counties, school districts, and special districts, and (3) city and county data aggregated by local government and year, complete with corresponding SOG data on local government employment and finances, city and county demographic variables, and more. This third dataset is used for the analysis in my working paper, "Pensions in the Trenches: How Pension Costs Are Affecting U.S. Local Government."
Please cite the following when using these data: Anzia, Sarah F. 2019. "Pensions in the Trenches: How Pension Costs Are Affecting U.S. Local Government." Goldman School of Public Policy working paper.
This project was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans, and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
Local Government CAFRs, 2005-2016
Local Government Pension Expenditure Datasets
City and County Data by Local Government and Year
U.S. Census Survey of Governments Employment Data
U.S. Census Survey of Governments Finance Data
Last updated on 03/18/2024