Do elections motivate incumbent politicians to serve their voters? In this paper, we use millions of service requests placed by residents in US cities to measure constituency responsiveness. We then test whether an unusual policy change in New York City, which enabled city councilors to run for three rather than two terms in office, improved constituency responsiveness in previously term-limited councilors' districts. Using difference-in-differences, we find robust evidence for this. Taking advantage of differential timing of local election races in New York City and San Francisco, we also find late-term improvements to responsiveness in districts represented by reelection-seeking incumbents. Elections improve municipal services, but also create cycles in constituency responsiveness. These findings have implications for theories of representative democracy.

This manuscript presents a new measure of safety net program effectiveness-a "poverty relief ratio"-that is based on the estimated relationship between market income and social transfers, and reports the amount of income support provided, relative to the amount required to provide for all low-income households' basic needs. In an important advance over the standard poverty reduction rate measures, the poverty relief ratio preserves the rank order of observations across varying poverty thresholds. In this paper, we introduce this measure and demonstrate its validity by tracking major changes in federal policy, and cross-state variation in safety net programs.