Special Versus General Elections and Composition of the Voters: Evidence From Louisiana School Tax Elections

Abstract

Using Louisiana school board property tax elections from the past decade, the authors study the question of whether or not special elections tend to produce lower turnout and a greater percentage of yes votes than do general elections. With the problem focusing on the choice of voting yes, voting no, or abstaining from voting, modified minimum chi-square methods are used in the analysis. The authors find that opposition to local school taxes increases with turnout. They also find that turnout is affected by the size of the tax, by the presence or absence of other taxes on the ballot, and by the presence or absence of state or federal matters on the same ballot. Both the inclusion of state or federal issues (or candidates) on the ballot and a higher tax rate lead to increased relative opposition at the polls.

The Strategic Timing of Direct Democracy

“… 4 This finding is consistent with the mixed empirical evidence on the effects of turnout on support for school referenda. Pecquet et al (1996) find that the proportion supporting Louisiana school bonds is lower in concurrent elections. Rubinfeld (1977) finds that changes in turnout, and not vote choice, explain a shift in the electoral success of a single referendum.…”

Does restricting choice in referenda enable governments to spend more?

“…These are listed in Table 1. The list includes virtually all if not all of the states whose referendums have been studied in the literature: Louisiana (Pecquet et al 1996), Michigan (Holcombe 1980), New Jersey (Megdal 1983), New York (Munley 1982(Munley , 1984, Oklahoma (Dunne et al 1997), and Oregon (Romer and Rosenthal 1978). In these 12 states, the number of elections per year in the typical school district ranges from 0.364 in West Virginia to 2.782 in Oklahoma.…”

Information, Tax Salience, and Support for School Bond Referenda

“…As noted by Gong and Rogers (), there are two popular methods of modeling vote shares: the method we employ, namely OLS, and the logit transformation of the share voting yes which takes the form: . Examples of studies that use a logit transformation include: Pecquet et al (), and Gong and Rogers (). Examples of studies that use OLS include: Gong and Rogers () and Thompson and Whitley ().…”