Responsiveness to City Service Requests, Life Satisfaction, and Horizontal Inequality: Does Good Local Governance Improve Subjective Well-Being for All?

TL;DR

The study finds that good local governance improves life satisfaction, but the benefits are greater in white neighborhoods than in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel analysis of how local governance affects subjective well-being differently across racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.

Findings

Good local governance significantly improves life satisfaction overall.

The benefits of good local governance are greater in white neighborhoods compared to Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Basic public services alone may not be enough to improve life satisfaction in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Abstract

Public health relevance—How does this work relate to a public health issue?
This paper examines the effects of local governance on life satisfaction, an important indicator of overall health and wellness.It also examines whether neighborhood-level race and ethnicity moderate this relationship.

This paper examines the effects of local governance on life satisfaction, an important indicator of overall health and wellness.

It also examines whether neighborhood-level race and ethnicity moderate this relationship.

Public health significance—Why is this work of significance to public health?
Our findings show that good local governance significantly improves overall life satisfaction.We also found that good local governance improves life satisfaction more in white neighborhoods than in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Our findings show that good local governance significantly improves overall life satisfaction.

We also found that good local governance improves life satisfaction more in white neighborhoods than in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Public health implications—What are the key implications or messages for practitioners, policy makers, and/or researchers in public health?
These findings indicate that meeting residents’ basic needs for public services is not sufficient to improve life satisfaction in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.More actively democratic processes of co-governance may be necessary to improve life satisfaction in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

These findings indicate that meeting residents’ basic needs for public services is not sufficient to improve life satisfaction in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

More actively democratic processes of co-governance may be necessary to improve life satisfaction in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Local governance has been found to be an important determinant of individuals’ subjective well-being (SWB) in cross-municipality studies in Europe and Asia. In addition, previous literature suggests that increasing access to determinants of SWB provides lesser SWB benefit to racial minorities compared to white people in the United States (U.S.). Given this context, we ask the following: (1) does good local governance improve SWB in the U.S.? and (2) does good local governance improve SWB for Black and Hispanic people equally compared to white people? To answer these questions, we examine Chicago, Illinois, the third-largest city in the U.S. with substantial Black and Hispanic populations. We model local governance, our independent variable, as the number of weeks for the municipality to respond to pothole service requests reported to the city’s non-emergency services system. Our dependent variable was life satisfaction, measured by the Cantril Ladder. Covariates included self-reported health problems, lack of money for food, sex, age, age-squared, and marital status. Neighborhood race/ethnicity was tested as a moderator of the primary relationships. We estimated linear regression models with and without race × governance interactions. Our findings demonstrate that local governance is an important determinant of SWB, but that it benefits SWB in white neighborhoods more than in Black/Hispanic neighborhoods.

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