Visible Inequality and Voter Support for Public Goods: Evidence from Ohio School Finance Referenda

Does inequality reduce willingness to collectively fund public goods? We examine this question using data from 3,273 school district referenda from the state of Ohio for the period from 2009 to 2019. We examine the differential effects of income inequality typically captured in economic surveys and the inequality that voters themselves perceive through variation in their community's housing stock. Our primary measure of perceived inequality is the 90/10 ratio of home values within a district - a dimension of inequality made salient by the physical landscape voters encounter in their everyday lives. We find that greater visible housing inequality is associated with a lower referendum yes-vote share whereas the Gini coefficient of income inequality is not. The effects of perceived inequality are concentrated in geographically compact districts where routine exposure to housing disparities is highest, and absent in more spreadout districts where such exposure is lower. The negative effect is also substantially attenuated in counties with stronger cross-income social ties, consistent with bridging social capital sustaining solidarity in the presence of salient inequality. Our results suggest that voters respond to the inequality they perceive in their community rather than inequalities in the underlying income distribution that are commonly used by social scientists to explain voter behavior.