The Politics of School Finance: Passing School Bonds

School bond elections receive little attention in political science or education policy literature, and the research that does exist is based on the observations of a single or a hand full of elections. Given the importance of bond elections as a revenue generating mechanism for schools as well as being one of the only cases where citizens can directly make decisions in regard to school district policy, we believe that more attention should be paid to this important policy process. This paper adds to the sparse literature on school bond elections by analyzing the determinants of success for 695 bond elections in the state of Texas. We find that bond election success is sensitive to needs, costs, resources, and measures of self interest. 2The Politics of School Finance: Passing School Bonds School bond issue elections are an ignored arena in both political science and the politics of education. Wirt and Kirst (1997, 114-120) devote only seven pages to referenda style elections in their survey of educational politics. A recent special issue of Educational Policy (Opfer and Wong 2002) on “The Politics of Elections and Education ” contained eleven essays on various aspects of elections and education, but not a single essay focused o