Determinants of Voting on Education Savings Accounts: Evidence from Tennessee

ABSTRACT

Tennessee passed voucher-style Education Savings Account (ESA) legislation in 2019. We analyze the roll call vote in the Tennessee House to better understand the role of constituent, legislator, and special interest influences on support for school choice. This is accomplished using a binary probit model with legislator vote as the dependent variable. We find that legislator voting behavior in this context is most significantly determined by party affiliation and the presence of campaign funding from the Tennessee Education Association (TEA) rather than the demographic characteristics of their constituents.

KEYWORDS:

• Median voter
• special interests
• voucher
• education savings account
• teacher union

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This theory is supported by the work of Wittman (1989) and Jones and Hudson (1998) in that the primary value of political parties is their ability reduce transaction costs by acting as a low-cost signal to voters of a bundle of candidate policy positions.

2. At the time of the vote, there were 99 members of the House – 73 of whom were Republicans.

3. The Achievement School District is located in Memphis and operates like a local school district in that it operates schools directly but also authorizes charter schools (Keller, 2020).

4. Only one Democrat in favor of the bill. Republican Debra Moody missed the vote for family reasons (Aldrich, 2019).

5. Data from ACS table B1405.

6. Ideally, we would have some measure of educational performance like graduation rates or test scores. However, Tennessee’s legislative districts do not run concurrently with school districts.

7. We could ideally test for the salience of schooling decisions by collecting data on the age of each child at the time of the vote, but we were unable to obtain this information.

8. We also tried to collect data on the types of schools – public or private – attended by their children. However, this proved to be impossible.

9. Comparing Figure 1to a map of Tennessee, you can see that our measures of urbanization correspond to the highest population areas: Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga and Clarksville.