Interjurisdictional Competition and Policy Preferences of the Public

The federal structure of the US government provides states and localities with significant autonomy in many policy domains. Prior research provides evidence that jurisdictions compete with one another in several of these domains. This evidence, however, comes almost exclusively from the decisions of political elites and provides little insight into potential public responsiveness to interjurisdictional competition. In this paper, we leverage a statewide referendum on education funding levels in Oklahoma to examine whether the degree of competition from across state borders systematically affected public support for increased educational funding. Results indicate that voting precincts facing stiff educational competition from school districts in other states supported the referendum at higher rates than precincts facing little competitive pressure. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase on our index of educational competition increases support for the referendum by one to two percentage points.