How Do Teacher Strikes Affect School Board Elections?

• In Event: School Board Elections and Governance in a Changing Political Environment

Abstract

Strikes are generally understood as labor conflicts between workers and management. However, strikes also serve as an expression of the agency of workers and as a form of collective action (Medearis 2020). Moreover, by virtue of shutting down work and coordinating protest activities, strikes threaten the “everyday, background sense of public order” (Gourevitch 2018, 906). Because of this, it is incorrect to think about strikes as involving only two parties. Rather, they involve three: labor, management, and “third parties”—people who are neither on strike nor the target of strikers’ protest actions (Lipsky 1968).

There is a large literature in economics and industrial relations about the effect of strikes on wages and other firm and financial outcomes (e.g., Ashenfelter & Johnson 1969, Becker 1986, Card 1990, Rubin 1986). A smaller body of work within political science looks at how strikes impact the political behavior of workers themselves (Lyon et al. 2024, Hertel-Fernandez et al. 2021). Few have examined how strikes shape the political behavior of third parties. But there is reason to believe they would, particularly when strikes involve public sector workers whose compensation and working conditions are shaped by elected officials.

We examine how teacher strikes affect school board election turnout. Strikes may increase voter turnout in school board elections if third parties see strikes as a signal that the school system is failing (Holbein 2016). Indeed, there is an established literature around the “dissatisfaction theory” of school governance, which holds that “the essence of democracy is the freedom to participate…when the people are dissatisfied enough” (Lutz and Wang 1987, 67). By a similar logic, potential voters may opt out of participation when they view policymakers as doing a good job reflecting their priorities. Potential voters may choose not to participate if they feel that teachers and their organizations have already successfully advocated for necessary changes via strikes.

We use an original dataset of school board elections and teacher strikes in two states. Our school board election data include 53,299,945 citizen-year observations from 10 years of school board elections in North Carolina and Washington State (2013-2022). We process individual voter registration and vote history files to construct school district-level turnout estimates through the QOR geospatial method (Shepardson et al 2026). Then, we employ a synthetic differences-in-differences approach that compares trends in outcomes in school districts who experienced a teacher strike to those from synthetic controls built from never-striking units (Arkhangelsky et al. 2021).

We find that teacher strikes meaningfully decrease turnout in school board elections. On average, we find that strikes pooled across states cause voter turnout to decrease by 2 percentage points. Effects are larger among voters aged 36-60 (roughly parent age) and during off cycle elections, when they decrease turnout by 7.5 percentage points.Our research makes two important contributions. (1) We use and provide a novel dataset of school board election turnout overall and for several subgroups, and (2) we demonstrate that teacher strikes lower turnout in subsequent school board elections.

Authors

• Melissa Arnold Lyon, University at Albany
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Adam Patrick Shepardson, University at Albany
  Presenting Author

• Joshua F Bleiberg, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Co-Author