This study asks whether far‑right electoral victories change how street‑level bureaucrats treat minority service seekers, focusing on registration with general practitioners in Italian municipalities. It combines an audit-style field experiment that varied callers’ accents with a regression discontinuity design around close mayoral elections to compare responses in places where far‑right candidates narrowly won versus lost. The central contribution is evidence about whether electoral outcomes at the municipal level are associated with changes in bureaucratic impartiality in a concrete public-service interaction.
Field experiment audit, Regression discontinuity around close elections, Municipal healthcare offices
Data and methods
The authors report an embedded research design in Italy that pairs an audit-style field experiment and a regression discontinuity design. Research assistants calling municipal healthcare offices used either native‑Italian or West‑African accents to request registration with a general practitioner; the RD focuses on municipalities near the electoral threshold for far‑right mayors. The abstract frames this as a comparison of caller treatment across accent and local electoral outcomes.
Main findings
According to the abstract, callers with West‑African accents experienced higher rates of scrutiny and dismissive responses compared with native‑Italian callers. The authors report that this disparity was larger in municipalities where far‑right candidates narrowly won, based on the close-election RD comparison. The abstract emphasizes these patterns as evidence that far‑right electoral success can be associated with reduced impartiality in access to essential services.
- Higher scrutiny and dismissive responses for West‑African‑accented callers versus native‑Italian callers.
- The accent‑based disparity is reported as exacerbated in municipalities with narrow far‑right mayoral victories.
