Does School Finance Litigation Cause Taxpayer Revolt? Serrano and Proposition 13

Law & Society Review, Sep 2006 by Martin, Isaac

School districts with high valuations per pupil stood to lose from the Serrano decision. Thus, the Fischel hypothesis implies the following:

HI: Individuals in districts with high valuations per pupil were more likely to vote for Proposition 13.

I also tested whether this district-level effect was present only for homeowners. Fischel argues that all homeowners in wealthy districts tended to prefer the local funding of schools to statewide equalization, since better-funded local schools tended to increase their property values. Thus, we might expect that the Serrano decision undermined support for the property tax among homeowners in particular:

H^sub 2^: Homeowners in districts with high valuations per pupil were more likely to vote for Proposition 13.

Fischel assumes that homeowners are generally interested in the value of their assets rather than in the quality of schooling per se. It is nevertheless reasonable to suppose that parents should be particularly sensitive to the link between property taxes and the real or perceived quality of their local schools (see Tedin 1994). Thus, even if Serrano did not affect the voting behavior of all Californians, it may have affected the voting behavior of parents:

H^sub 3^: Parents of schookhildren in districts with high valuations per pupil were more likely to vote for Proposition 13.

By necessity, I operationalized parents of schoolchildren differently for each sample. For respondents to the FICP, I constructed a dichotomous variable equal to one if the respondent reported having any children between ages six and 18 inclusive. For respondents to the CTRS, I constructed a dichotomous variable equal to one if the respondent reported having any children in the public schools.5

The tests OfHi-H3 that I report below, like all previous tests of the Fischel hypothesis (Fischel 2001, 2004; Stark & Zasloff 2003), relied of necessity on a nonrandom subset of California school districts that could be matched to voting data. Because I drew on voting data from two representative samples of Californians, however, it was possible to quantify the resulting biases. The multilevel structure of the data set also permitted me to model sample selection explicitly (Heckman 1979). I report the results of probit models with explicit corrections for sample selection in the Appendix. These models suggest that sample selection bias does not affect the conclusions of the analysis.

In the second part of the study, I analyzed all voters in the FICP, regardless of whether they could be matched to school districts. The key to this part of the study was a pair of attitude questions in the FICP that permitted me to test whether the subjective interests that survey respondents expressed with respect to the Serrano decision were associated with their propensity to vote for Proposition 13. The survey recorded individuals' opinions about school finance equalization in general and the Serrano decision in particular. Fischel has argued explicitly that the average voter understood the distributive implications of Serrano (Fischel 1989), and that voter support for Proposition 13 reflected an underlying preference for unequal school finance (Fischel 2002). If he is correct, opposition to equalization and opposition to Serrano should both be positively associated with the vote for Proposition 13.