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The Politics of Choice Reconsidered: Partisanship, Ideology, and Minority Politics in Washington's Charter School Initiative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Loren Collingwood ,
Ashley Jochim  and
Kassra A. R. Oskooii
Loren Collingwood
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA
Ashley Jochim
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Bothell, WA, USA
Kassra A. R. Oskooii*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
*
Kassra A. R. Oskooii, University of Delaware, 403 Smith Hall, 18 Amstel Ave., Newark, DE 19716, USA. Email: oskooiik@udel.edu
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Abstract

Charter schools enjoy support among Republican and Democratic lawmakers in states and Congress, but little research has examined their support among the electorate. We take advantage of Washington's 2012 charter school ballot initiative—the first voter-approved charter initiative in the United States—to shed light on the politics of school choice at the mass level. Because in-depth, individual-level voter data are often unavailable in state-level elections, we leverage extensive precinct- and district-level data to examine patterns of support and opposition toward the charter school initiative, focusing on how partisanship, ideology, and demographic factors serve to unify or divide voters. Our analysis reveals that the coalition of supporters cut across usual partisan and demographic cleavages, producing somewhat strange bedfellows. This finding has important implications for the strategies advocacy groups may consider as they seek to expand or limit school choice programs via ballot initiatives as opposed to the statehouse, and provides suggestive evidence regarding the evolving shapers of voter support for school choice and ballot initiatives more generally.

Keywords

direct democracypolitical behaviorracial and ethnic politicsidentity/group politicseducation policypublic policyGIS/spatial analysismethodologyvoting and elections
Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 61 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018

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