Public Schools and Their Pensions: How Is Pension Spending Affecting U.S. School Districts?

Abstract: State and local government decisions about how school funding is raised and allocated have profound impacts on American public education, and in recent years, experts have documented large increases in one type of spending in particular: public pensions. Because most data on school district pension expenditures are at the state level, it has so far been difficult to assess what changes local school districts have made in response. In this paper, I analyze a new dataset of the annual pension expenditures of approximately 200 unified school districts across the United States from 2005 to 2016. Consistent with findings in the literature, I find that pension expenditures rose in real terms in most of them, but also that there has been significant variation in that growth. Moreover, in a descriptive analysis, I find that larger within-district pension expenditure growth is associated with (1) greater revenue growth in the subsequent year and (2) reductions in school district employment, mainly through reductions in the number of non-teaching staff. Finally, there is evidence that districts’ responses to rising pension expenditures may depend on state political institutions, in particular whether the states have mandatory collective bargaining for teachers

Replication Data for: "When Does a Group of Citizens Influence Policy? Evidence from Senior Citizen Participation in City Politics"

Replication data and code for Anzia, Sarah F., "When Does a Group of Citizens Influence Policy? Evidence from Senior Citizen Participation in City Politics.

Interest Groups on the Inside: The Governance of Public Pension Funds

A subversive line of new scholarship in American politics argues that interest groups need to be brought to the analytic center of the field once again. This paper attempts to further that agenda. We reconnect with an older literature of great importance—on capture, subgovernments, and interest group liberalism—to study interest groups as insiders that play routine, officially recognized roles as part of government itself. Our empirical focus is on staterun public pension boards: which control trillions of dollars, have vast fiscal and social consequences, and are commonly designed to give public employees and their unions official roles in governing their own pension systems. We develop a theory arguing—contrary to existing scholarly work—that these groups can actually be expected to favor policies that undermine the fiscal integrity of these plans. Through an analysis of key decisions by 99 pension boards over the period 2001-2014, we show that this is in fact the case—and that, for public-sector pensions, these “interest groups on the inside” wield genuine influence that weakens effective government

Do Politicians Use Policy to Make Politics? The Case of Public Sector Labor Laws

Schattschneider’s insight that “policies make politics” has played an influential role in the modern study of political institutions and public policy. Yet if policies do indeed make politics, rational politicians clearly have opportunities to use policies to create a future structure of politics more to their own advantage — and this strategic dimension has gone almost entirely unexplored. Do politicians actually use policies to make politics? Under what conditions? In this paper, we develop a theoretical argument about what can be expected from strategic politicians, and we carry out an empirical analysis on a policy development that is particularly instructive: the adoption of public sector collective bargaining laws by the states during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s — laws that fueled the rise of public sector unions, and “made politics” to the great advantage of Democrats over Republicans

Interest Groups on the Inside: The Governance of Public Pension Funds

New scholarship in American politics argues that interest groups should be brought back to the center of the field. We attempt to further that agenda by exploring an aspect of group influence that has been little studied: the role interest groups play on the inside of government as official participants in bureaucratic decision-making. The challenges for research are formidable, but a fuller understanding of group influence in American politics requires that they be taken on. Here we carry out an exploratory analysis that focuses on the bureaucratic boards that govern public pensions. These are governance structures of enormous financial consequence for state governments, public workers, and taxpayers. They also make decisions that are quantitative (and comparable) in nature, and they usually grant official policymaking authority to a key interest group: public employees and their unions. Our analysis suggests that “interest groups on the inside” do have influence—in ways that weaken effective government. Going forward, scholars should devote greater attention to how insider roles vary across agencies and groups, how groups exercise influence in these ways, how different governance structures shape their policy effects, and what it all means for our understanding of interest groups in American politics

Do Politicians Use Policy to Make Politics? The Case of Public-Sector Labor Laws

Schattschneider’s insight that “policies make politics” has played an influential role in the modern study of political institutions and public policy. Yet if policies do indeed make politics, rational politicians clearly have opportunities to use policies to create a future structure of politics more to their own advantage — and this strategic dimension has gone almost entirely unexplored. Do politicians actually use policies to make politics? Under what conditions? In this paper, we develop a theoretical argument about what can be expected from strategic politicians, and we carry out an empirical analysis on a policy development that is particularly instructive: the adoption of public sector collective bargaining laws by the states during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s — laws that fueled the rise of public sector unions, and “made politics” to the great advantage of Democrats over Republicans

The Election Timing Effect: Evidence from a Policy Intervention in Texas.” Working paper

Abstract: Recent studies have argued that the low voter turnout that accompanies off-cycle elections could create an advantage for interest groups. However, the endogeneity of election timing makes it difficult to estimate its causal effect on political outcomes. In this paper, I examine the effects of a 2006 Texas law that forced approximately 20 percent of the state"s school districts to move their elections to the same day as national elections. Using matching as well as district fixed effects regression, I estimate the causal effect of the switch to on-cycle election timing on average district teacher salary, since teachers and their unions tend to be the dominant interest group in school board elections. I find that school districts that were forced to switch to on-cycle elections responded by granting significantly lower salary raises to teachers, supporting the hypothesis that school trustees were less responsive to the dominant interest group after the switch. * Thank you t