Do highly educated politicians adopt different public policies than less-educated politicians? Existing research disagrees about this question. While some recent studies argue that highly educated politicians deliver better performance, others find no effects of education on economic or public policy outcomes. This article studies this question using a comprehensive dataset with information about the education, age, and gender of elected local politicians in Spain and fine-grained economic and fiscal data collected between 2003 and 2011. Applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we find that when parties with more-educated councilors narrowly win the election, governments do not perform better on a number of valence indicators. However, further analyses reveal that local governments led by more-educated politicians have lower levels of capital spending and capital transfers per capita. Our findings suggest that educated and noneducated politicians differ on preferences rather than on ability and call into question that education can be used as a proxy of the “quality” of politicians.

This chapter analyzes a surprising wave of 311 lethal attacks by drug cartels against local elected officials and party candidates in Mexico (2007–2012). As the War on Drugs intensified, competition for turf increased and drug lords expanded their range of actions into new illicit markets – including extortion, kidnapping, and the extraction of natural resources. Cartels attacked mayors and local party candidates to develop subnational governance regimes as part of their new strategy. We use time-series cross-sectional analyses to show that attacks took place in subnational regions where intergovernmental partisan conflict between Right and Left was more intense and mayors and local party candidates were unprotected and vulnerable. Attacks took place disproportionately during subnational election cycles, when new governments were elected and new appointments were made. Two natural experiments, contrasting municipalities along the Michoacán–Guerrero and Michoacán–Guanajuato borders, show that political vulnerability and political opportunity are causally related to the probability of attacks against mayors and party candidates.

A rural, working-class community of about 12,000 residents (38 percent of whom are African American), Brookhaven, Mississippi, is located in Lincoln County, approximately 60 miles south of Jackson, the state’s capital. Traditionally, Brookhaven has been dominated by timber and cotton concerns, and these industries still play a major role in the community, along with light industry and warehousing and distribution services. In tacit acknowledgment of the economic and social challenges the town has faced in an era of globalization and rising economic inequality, a local history describes the town as “a charismatic survivor” that persisted in the face of “vicissitudes similar to those which resulted in the diminishment or disappearance of [other] formerly flourishing Lincoln County villages and towns.”