Does Leader Turnover Degrade Local Government Performance? Evidence from Local Election Officials

Three forces push in different directions. New officials may need time to learn how to do their job leading to more mistakes early on. On the other hand, limited competition and information about official performance may insulate mediocre but experienced officials from accountability, resulting in better performance when an experienced official leaves. Alternatively, turnover may not disrupt performance much if experienced leaders are replaced by experienced deputies who have already trained for the role. In this paper, we study the effect of turnover by focusing on a widely discussed case: the recent departures of many local officials who conduct elections. We build an original, large-scale dataset containing the names and service tenures of chief local election officials in all 50 states from 2000 to 2024, encompassing more than 18,000 officials serving in over 6,000 jurisdictions. Using a variety of difference-in-differences and panel matching analyses, we find that losing an election official prior to an election does not affect participation or other observable indicators of performance, with the possible exception of wait times at the polls. Our estimates are precise enough to reject effects on turnout greater than 0.36 percentage points across all of our main specifications. Despite the concern that increases in leader turnover will degrade the quality of local election administration, we find that election performance is remarkably resilient in the face of leadership changes.

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