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 tha