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Replication Data for: Performance Federalism and Local Democracy: Theory and Evidence from School Tax Referenda

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Performance Federalism and Local Democracy: Theory and Evidence from School Tax Referenda
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/29095
 
Creator Kogan, Vladimir
Lavertu, Stéphane
Peskowitz, Zachary
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Federal governments are increasingly employing empirical measures of lower-level government performance to ensure that provincial and local jurisdictions pursue national policy goals. We call this burgeoning phenomenon performance federalism and argue that it can distort democratic accountability in lower-level elections. We estimate the impact of a widely publicized federal indicator of local school district performance - one that we show does not allow voters to draw valid inferences about the quality of local educational institutions - on voter support for school tax levies in a U.S. state uniquely appropriate for this analysis. The results indicate that a signal of poor district performance increases the probability of levy failure - a substantively large and robust effect that disproportionately affects impoverished communities. The analysis employs a number of identification strategies and tests for multiple behavioral mechanisms to support the causal interpretation of these findings.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Federalism
Performance measurement
Voting behavior
New Public Management
Education politics
No Child Left Behind
 
Contributor Zachary Peskowitz