Mayoral Decision-Making: Issue Salience, Decision Context, and Choice Constraint? An Experimental Study with 120 Latin American Mayors

This study explores the effect on mayoral decision-making of three aspects of the decision environment: issue salience, context, and constraint. The study also tests the moderator effect that decision environment may have on a mayor's qualifications in terms of education and experience. These effects were tested on data drawn from a survey experiment whose subjects were 120 incumbent mayors representing 12 Latin American countries. Mayors were presented with a hypothetical municipal problem in which their decision consisted of dealing with the problem by themselves or by delegating spending authority to a private agency. After manipulating the salience of the municipal problem (education vs. infrastructure), stressful context (statement about presence of guerrillas vs. no statement), and choice constraint (capable vs. incapable delegated private agency), analysis of variance and logit results show that under no constraint, mayors tend to delegate spending authority to a private agency for dealing with education, but not for infrastructure problems. Findings may suggest that mayors see more opportunities for rent-seeking and/or political benefits from handling spending personally in infrastructure but not in education. In Latin America, the position of city manager does not exist, making the elected mayor the primary decision-maker, and as most of the social spending takes place at the municipal level, mayors' decisions have a significant impact on development.