School Characteristics and Voting: What Matters in Turnout and Passage

Abstract

Do school characteristics predict the likelihood of turning out to vote on tax referendums for school funding or predict passage of tax referendums for school funding? I rely on publicly available Florida Voter Registration files and connect voters to their closest elementary school. I then aggregate individual data to the precinct level to test what characteristics predict the passage of tax referendums. Pairing the individual level turnout data with the precinct level data, I find that there are differences in the composition of voters across election types and these voters are responding to different characteristics of schools. While we might expect school characteristics to matter more for special elections, this is not the case. School characteristics matter less in special elections because who is turning out to vote is different in those elections. General elections are the only time in which school performance is statistically related to the percent of yes vote.