The Equity Factor

To Get Things Done, Lawmakers Increasingly Turn to the Local Vote

New research from the Brookings Institution finds that more local and state lawmakers are opting for ballot referendums to boost the economy.

Graph from the Brookings Institution

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As federal spending has dried up in recent decades, lawmakers have increasingly turned to ballot referendums to approve funding at both the city and state level, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution.

This is not to say that cities and states don’t take federal funds anymore. They take plenty, in the form of grants and stimulus money and whatnot. But when there’s a need for some extra cash, local officials wouldn’t necessarily be imprudent if they left the decision to voters.

From the report:

From closing business tax loopholes in order to fund clean energy projects to investing in prekindergarten programs, postsecondary educational facilities, and transit infrastructure, voters have proven their willingness to invest tax dollars in ways that strengthen the economy and foster more widely shared prosperity.

As you can see in the graph up top, the jump in referenda began in the waning years of the George H.W. Bush administration, and increased throughout the Clinton and George W. years.

“That’s when you really saw a lot of the single-issue attempts to turn out voters from specific parties,” Jessica A. Lee, an associate fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. “So you’d see anti-marriage equality measures that came out to drive GOP voters to the polls. There were some similar efforts from the Democrat side with minimum wage measures to try to turn out more liberal voters.”

What was initially designed to trick voters into coming to the polls — here is this hot-button issue you really care about, now vote for me — slowly turned into sound policy. City and state leaders realized they had more power to steer their own economies when they put funding up for a vote.

Conventional budgets and the miles of red tape that come with them are, in some ways, not as powerful as they used to be. The quicker route to funding infrastructure and education is at the municipal and state level. (Some states even have it written in their constitution that projects must be voted on before they get the green light.) All those yard signs you see leading up to election day — Vote No On Proposal 2! — aren’t just some lightning-rod issue debated in the local paper. And they don’t just refer to funding the local museum or holiday parade. They’re real, tangible projects that could not only affect the economy, but education as well.

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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Tags: urban planningequity factorvoting

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