The Spatial Range of Public Goods Revealed Through Referendum Voting

Abstract

Billions of dollars are now spent annually in the United States and Europe for spatially delineated environmental services such as agricultural landscape management and river restoration programs, yet little is known about the spatial distribution of the benefits from these policies. This paper develops a framework for recovering information on this question from the spatial pattern of votes cast for referenda on the provision of spatially delineated public goods. We specify a model linking voter support for environmental improvement to the distance at which such improvements are expected to occur. The empirical application is to a river restoration referendum in the Swiss canton of Bern. Our results indicate that the benefits from river restoration have a strong local component, sufficiently strong that voter approval would not occur if only canton-wide benefits were at stake. Surprisingly, support for river restoration is no greater, and in some specifications is actually lower, in locations where rivers are a prominent feature in the environment.

Do spatial climate messages increase pro-environmental engagement? Evidence from a survey experiment on public transport

“…They conclude that a substantial part of voluntary climate action is driven by concerns for local co-benefits, such as a reduction in local air pollution. Deacon and Schläpfer (2010) find that local co-benefits of a river restoration program in Switzerland were crucial for the success of a referendum vote on its implementation. It is thus conceivable that local messages increase the salience of such co-benefits and thereby increase proenvironmental behaviour.…”

Political Preferences and the Spatial Distribution of Infrastructure: Evidence from California's High-Speed Rail

“…Voting Faced with a choice between Y and N, households vote "Yes" if and only if u ω (Y ) > u ω (N ). Aggregating over individuals, given utility (1), our setup corresponds to a probabilistic voting model (Deacon and Shapiro, 1975), with the fraction of positive votes in location i defined as…”

“…Alesina and Giuliano (2011) review research that uses survey data to measure preferences for private vs. public value in income taxation. Kahn and Matsusaka (1997), Deacon and Schläpfer (2010), and Wu and Cutter (2011) use ballots to draw inference about demand for collective goods following Deacon and Shapiro (1975).…”

Inadequate Standards in the Valuation of Public Goods and Ecosystem Services: Why Economists, Environmental Scientists and Policymakers Should Care

“…In 1997, the voters of the canton of Bern were called to vote on a proposal to spend CHF 3 million annually on river restoration projects. This amount corresponded to about CHF per person and year (see [38,39] for a detailed description). The parliament opposed the measure.…”

“…Another interesting alternative in non-market valuation is the analysis of collective decisions [48], [64] (p. 48), [65] (p. 18), [66]. Willingness to pay information can be derived from voting decisions about tax-financed public goods [39,40,67]. Even financing decisions by parliaments may provide relevant information about the value of public goods, provided that certain institutional requirements are met [68] or public support can be established from auxiliary analyses of public opinion [69].…”