Analyzing voter support for California’s local option sales taxes for transportation

Partisanship and Property Tax Redistribution: Evidence From Repealing Colorado's Gallagher Amendment

“…The results suggest that Democrat-leaning voters are more willing than Republicans to tax themselves to ameliorate a policy situation they find undesirable. Whereas existing research tends to find that Democrats are more willing to raise taxes to finance public goods (see, e.g., Brown et al 2021 andFranko et al 2013), this study extends this literature to a tax policy context exclusively redistributive in nature.…”

The Quiet Revolution Revisited: Low-Information Voting and Ballot Box Support for Public Transportation in the United States

“…As such, the idea of transit reducing congestion remains politically compelling. [9] Appeals to identity, as opposed to self-interest, tie transit to issues where voters already have mental or emotional investments, essentially hitching transit to the pre-existing political momentum these other issues enjoy. Environmentalism, for example, is rarely framed as a matter of direct, or even indirect, selfinterest.…”

“…[8] Barbour and Thoron (2023) show that from 1976-2023, local tax ballots in California dedicated an average of 32 percent of their funding explicitly to roads, and an average of 14 percent to local governments to use at their discretion (much of which was spent on roads). [9] To clarify: transit advocates do not necessarily lie to voters about congestion. More often they are artfully vague; they might say transit will "help the tra c situation."…”