ArticleThe Milbank quarterly2021
Linking Data on Constituent Health with Elected Officials' Opinions: Associations Between Urban Health Disparities and Mayoral Officials' Beliefs About Health Disparities in Their Cities.
Article in The Milbank quarterly, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Court-mandated redistricting and disparities in infant mortality and deaths of despair.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Measuring variation in infant mortality and deaths of despair by US congressional district in Pennsylvania: a methodological case study.American journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Necessary, burdensome, or threatening? Awareness of Black-White disparities in health care access and self-rated health for Black and White Americans.The American journal of orthopsychiatry · 2024Article
- Considering multiple governance levels in epidemiologic analysis of public policies.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
- Heterogeneity in Disparities in Life Expectancy Across US Metropolitan Areas.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Policy Points Mayoral officials' opinions about the existence and fairness of health disparities in their city are positively associated with the magnitude of income-based life expectancy disparity in their city. Associations between mayoral officials' opinions about health disparities in their city and the magnitude of life expectancy disparity in their city are not moderated by the social or fiscal ideology of mayoral officials or the ideology of their constituents. Highly visible and publicized information about mortality disparities, such as that related to COVID-19 disparities, has potential to elevate elected officials' perceptions of the severity of health disparities and influence their opinions about the issue. CONTEXT: A substantive body of research has explored what factors influence elected officials' opinions about health issues. However, no studies have assessed the potential influence of the health of an elected official's constituents. We assessed whether the magnitude of income-based life expectancy disparity within a city was associated with the opinions of that city's mayoral official (i.e., mayor or deputy mayor) about health disparities in their city.
methodsThe independent variable was the magnitude of income-based life expectancy disparity in US cities. The magnitude was determined by linking 2010-2015 estimates of life expectancy and median household income for 8,434 census tracts in 224 cities. The dependent variables were mayoral officials' opinions from a 2016 survey about the existence and fairness of health disparities in their city (n = 224, response rate 30.3%). Multivariable logistic regression was used to adjust for characteristics of mayoral officials (e.g., ideology) and city characteristics.
findingsIn cities in the highest income-based life expectancy disparity quartile, 50.0% of mayoral officials "strongly agreed" that health disparities existed and 52.7% believed health disparities were "very unfair." In comparison, among mayoral officials in cities in the lowest disparity quartile 33.9% "strongly agreed" that health disparities existed and 22.2% believed the disparities were "very unfair." A 1-year-larger income-based life expectancy disparity in a city was associated with 25% higher odds that the city's mayoral official would "strongly agree" that health disparities existed (odds ratio [OR] = 1.25; P = .04) and twice the odds that the city's mayoral official would believe that such disparities were "very unfair" (OR = 2.24; P <.001).
conclusionsMayoral officials' opinions about health disparities in their jurisdictions are generally aligned with, and potentially influenced by, information about the magnitude of income-based life expectancy disparities among their constituents.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.