Christopher Berry, "Direct Democracy and Redistribution Reassessing the Voter Initiative"

Christopher Berry,  Associate Professor, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago.

One of the most robust empirical findings about direct democracy is that US states with the voter initiative tax and spend significantly less than states without the initiative, at least since the mid-1970's.

The relationship between initiative status and fiscal policy has been interpreted as causal and as an indication that voters prefer smaller government than legislators. Yet existing research has not explained exactly which elements of the public budget are cut in initiative states.

First, I establish that the fiscal differential between initiative and non-initiative states is not due to smaller government budgets in general, but specifically due to lesser and more unequal education funding, primarily resulting from reductions in state aid to local school districts.

Next, drawing upon a newly created data set that traces state education funding from the late 1800's to today, I explore the origins of these fiscal differentials. I find that some of the differences between would-be initiative and non-initiative states are evident even before the initiative existed. Others emerged only many decades after the initiative had been adopted.

Tracing the causal pathway from the voter initiative to contemporary policy outcomes—if indeed there is one—is therefore a major challenge for scholarship in this area.

I discuss implications of these results for the understanding of direct democracy and its effects on the relationship between voters and politicians.

About the speaker: Christopher R. Berry, an associate professor in the Harris School, is director of the Center for Municipal Finance and faculty director of the Master of Science Program in Computational Analysis and Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

His research interests include metropolitan governance, the politics of public finance, and intergovernmental fiscal relations. Berry is the author of Imperfect Union: Representation and Taxation in Multilevel Governments (Cambridge UP, 2010), winner of the Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association. 

Prior to joining Chicago Harris, Berry was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University in the Department of Government's Program on Education Policy and Governance.

He received his BA from Vassar College, Master of Regional Planning (MRP) from Cornell University, and PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Professor Berry is also active in community development and was formerly a director in the MetroEdge division of ShoreBank, which was America's oldest and largest community development financial institution.

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