Strategies for Engaging and Communicating with Elected Officials

Communicating with Elected Officials

ITE JOURNAL / DECEMBER 2005 ONE OF THE MOST FRUSTRATING aspects of being a transportation professional, especially one with an engineering background, is the seeming reluctance of elected officials to readily accept the recommendations of highly qualified technical staffs. This feature is intended to help transportation technical staffs better understand the context within which elected officia...

Elected officials.

FAQs for Elected Officials

Primary Elections and the Quality of Elected Officials∗

In this paper we argue that the literature underestimates the value of primaries, because it focuses on overall average effects. The value of primaries is likely to vary across situations. We argue that primary elections are most needed in safe constituencies, where one party’s candidate will have a large advantage in the general election – even if that party’s candidate is “low quality”. In sa...

Does Constituency Size Affect Elected Officials’ Trade Policy Preferences?

Scholars have long argued that Presidents are less protectionist than Congress while Senators are less so than Representatives due to their larger constituencies. Yet until now this theory has escaped scrutiny. I argue that it is based on a misguided view of trade policy as distributive politics. I show via a series of tests that the theory is untenable. Unlike their differences in constituency...