Is the Personnel Political? Examining the Role of Partisanship in School District Superintendent Appointments from 2009-2019 (Poster 14)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Although the U.S. has become more politically polarized in recent decades, partisan political divisions have unevenly permeated into local government settings. Why do some local policy issues become politically polarized, while others remain characterized by bipartisan consensus? In this paper, I examine this question using the case of local government hiring decisions, a context where officials have competing incentives to engage and disengage in partisanship. I focus on the case of school boards' hiring decisions for superintendent positions, examining data on appointments in Florida and California over the past decade from 2009-2019. I construct a novel dataset of over 1,100 superintendent hiring outcomes matched to public voter files to identify the partisan affiliation of board members and superintendents over time. I supplement these data with qualitative records on 42 unique hiring processes. I find that superintendent appointments are not typically politically polarized, even when school boards have polarized on other policy issues during the same time period, and when school board members themselves have strong partisan identities. Instead, school boards prioritize nonpartisan policy goals when they discuss their priorities for superintendent appointments, viewing these appointments through a frame of "professionalism". I argue that the expression of partisanship in local politics is not merely a function of institutional context, but depends on local actors' decision calculus on specific policy issues.

Author

• Greer Mellon, Columbia University