Do Elected Officials Have a Home-Grown Bias? Evidence from an Audit Study on Local Elected Officials

Do elected officials have a “home-grown” bias—that is, a bias toward those that profess to have lived in their constituencies for longer periods of time and share a sense of local values? Building off a wealth of experimental research on group-based biases among elected officials, I conduct an original experimental audit study on a randomly selected group of local elected officials across ten states. The treatments come in the form of email communication from a hypothetical constituent that expresses how long they have been a member of the official’s community and whether they feel their set of values matches the community. I find that local elected officials respond to messages that make their home-group identities salient in a discriminatory manner toward members of the out-group. Specifically, I find that officials are far less likely to respond to constituent requests when the constituent mentions that they feel they do not share the community’s values. The chance of response decreases even further if the lack of shared values is coupled with mention that the constituent is a recent transplant into the community.