Why are residential preferences uncorrelated with voting preferences for the same amenity?

• In Event: State and Local Policymaking

Abstract

Across the United States, partisan differences in support for collective investments are a persistent feature of local and state ballot measures. Democrats typically have a higher approval rate than Republicans for public spending on public goods, such as environmental improvements and education, yet housing decisions reveal similar preferences for proximity or exposure to those same public goods. This paper investigates the mechanisms behind these cross‑venue preference differences by linking survey‑based referendum votes to respondents’ revealed residential choices in the context of land conservation and public education. We fielded a web‑push survey of 17,000 registered voters across five states, stratified by party affiliation and neighborhood amenities. Each respondent is geocoded to capture proximity to conserved lands and local school quality as spatial indicators of access to and quality of public‑good exposure. The survey instrument includes referendum questions about land conservation and local schools to assess voting preferences and many questions about fundamental preferences (e.g., altruism, parochialism, risk tolerance, and individualism) that have been shown to differ across partisans and may explain the change in preferences across venues.  Key results can be summarized as follows: 1) Residential preferences (living in proximity to open space or in a high-quality school zone) have near-zero explanatory power for referendum approval, indicating preferences across these venues are decoupled. 2) We conduct a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of the partisan gap and find that most of the gap can be explained by differences in fundamental preferences, primarily universal altruism. 3) A one-standard deviation increase in universal altruism increases willingness-to-pay for nearby land conservation by 40%. Together, these results imply that fundamental preferences impact voting but not residential choice, which has implications for non-market valuation research and the functioning of direct democracy to supply public goods efficiently.

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Author

• Corey Lang, University of Rhode Island
  Presenting Author