Abstract
Low and uneven election turnout has contributed to widespread concern about bias in American democracy as well as wide-ranging efforts at reform. Unfortunately, few reforms have proven to be both effective and politically viable. In this paper, we investigate the effect of local election timing as one such possible reform. Moving to on-cycle city elections that are held on the same day as statewide contests is viable because support for such a change is high public and the reform is relatively easy to implement. But is it effective? We combine data on the timing of all municipal elections in California between 2008 and 2016 and detailed micro-targeting data with demographic information appended to the voter file data to document the substantial impact of election timing on who votes in urban democracy. Leveraging variation in election times within cities over time, we show that moving to on-cycle elections lead to an electorate that is much more representative in terms of race, class, age, and partisanship — especially when these local elections coincide with a presidential election race.