Retrospective Voting in Single Function Elections: School Boards and Student Achievement By

For too long, research on retrospective voting has fixated on how economic trends impact incumbents’ electoral prospects in national and state elections. Hundreds of thousands of elections in the United States occur at the local level and have little to do with unemployment or inflation rates. This paper focuses on the most prevalent: school boards. Specifically, it examines whether voters hold school board members accountable for the performance of their schools, as measured by standardized tests. Its empirical findings demonstrate that voters evaluate school board members on the basis of student learning trends—just as they hold presidents, members of Congress, and governors responsible for economic developments. From the initial decision to run to the final vote tallies in 2000, robust relationships between student test scores and incumbents’ electoral fortunes are observed. Moreover, consistent with recent scholarship on “strategic politicians,” test scores have their greatest impact on incumbents’ and challengers’ decisions to run. During the 2002 school board elections, however, when voter turnout declined by half, test scores did not influence incumbents’ electoral fortunes. Consistent with other scholars’ findings, we suggest that possibilities for retrospective voting and democratic accountability critically depend upon the timing of local elections and an electorate’s composition. Do voters reward elected officials for a job well done? Or do voters’ ballot selections primarily reflect candidates’ policy positions? Few questions in political science have attracted more scholarly attention. Indeed, the literature on retrospective voting – the proposition that citizens examine whether the state of the world has improved under a politician’s watch, and vote accordingly – ranks among the most sophisticated within the social sciences (for reviews, see (Monroe 1979; Kiewiet and Rivers 1984; Fiorina 1997; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000). Two features of the empirical literature on retrospective voting stand out. First, presidents, members of Congress, and (occasionally) governors are its sole protagonists, while local politicians are regularly overlooked. Second, the bulk of the literature remains fixated on developments in the domestic economy. Though federal and state politicians may expend considerable resources addressing issues that have no obvious relationship with the economy, the empirical literature on retrospective voting supposes that a voter’s decision to support or oppose an incumbent’s reelection efforts ultimately rides upon recent changes in inflation and unemployment rates. Nothing about the theory of retrospective voting, however, requires that empirical explorations rest on these two foundations (Downs 1957; Key 1966; Fiorina 1981). There is, further, good reason for departing from them both. The vast majority of elections in the United States occur at the local level, and many pit candidates with policy positions that concern a small number of well defined functions. While presidents and members of Congress attend to a dizzying array of public policies, sheriffs, district attorneys, highway superintendents, and school board members oversee considerably simpler policy universes that revolve around public safety, criminal conviction rates, traffic, and student learning,