How High-Income Neighborhoods Receive More Service from Municipal Government: Evidence from City Administrative Data

Abstract

Do economic inequalities translate into political inequalities, and if so, how? Combining data on over 500,000 requests for services from the 24-Hour Constituent Service Hotline in Boston, Massachusetts with fine-grained census data on income, we show that higher-income census tracts request and receive more services from the city’s government than do lower-income census tracts located in the same neighborhood. To ensure that these results are not driven by differences in the service needs of higher- vs. lower-income areas, we first estimate them using only requests for snow removal, because snowfall affects the entire city. We report that a 10% increase in the per-capita income of a census tract predicts roughly a 3% increase in the number of requests for snow removal (p