Visible Inequality and Voter Support for Public Goods: Evidence from Ohio School Finance Referenda

Sutirtha Bagchi, Camryn Browne () and Corey Lang ()
Additional contact information
Camryn Browne: Department of Economics, Villanova School of Business, Villanova University, https://www.linkedin.com/in/camryn-browne-a372232a6/
Corey Lang: Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, College of the Environment and Life Sciences, The University of Rhode Island, https://web.uri.edu/enre/meet/corey-lang/

No 65, Villanova School of Business Department of Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series from Villanova School of Business Department of Economics and Statistics

Abstract: Does inequality reduce willingness to collectively fund public goods? We examine this question using data from 3,273 school district referenda from the state of Ohio for the period from 2009 to 2019. We examine the differential effects of income inequality typically captured in economic surveys and the inequality that voters themselves perceive through variation in their community's housing stock. Our primary measure of perceived inequality is the 90/10 ratio of home values within a district - a dimension of inequality made salient by the physical landscape voters encounter in their everyday lives. We find that greater visible housing inequality is associated with a lower referendum yes-vote share whereas the Gini coefficient of income inequality is not. The effects of perceived inequality are concentrated in geographically compact districts where routine exposure to housing disparities is highest, and absent in more spreadout districts where such exposure is lower. The negative effect is also substantially attenuated in counties with stronger cross-income social ties, consistent with bridging social capital sustaining solidarity in the presence of salient inequality. Our results suggest that voters respond to the inequality they perceive in their community rather than inequalities in the underlying income distribution that are commonly used by social scientists to explain voter behavior.

Keywords: Perceived Inequality; Housing; Public Goods; Voting; Referendum; Economic Connectedness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D72 H41 H75 I22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.library.villanova.edu/workingpapers/VSBEcon65.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vil:papers:65

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Villanova School of Business Department of Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series from Villanova School of Business Department of Economics and Statistics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher Kilby ().