We are making the adjustment to teaching arts policy at a distance for the remainder of the semester, and so I’m about to get used to (and hopefully better at) short videos for students, practitioners, anyone with an interest.
In this one – I kept it to eighteen minutes – I talk about a study I did on the 2002 referendum in Metro Detroit that would have seen a property tax increase to provide funding for a number of arts organizations. It failed. In my study I took precinct-level voting data, matched the precincts to census tracts, and looked at the characteristics of census tracts that made it more likely that people would vote in favour of the tax increase. Levels of formal education mattered (though income and house value did not, nor did average age); distance from the Detroit city arts core mattered, and most significant, reflecting how partisan an issue this has become, was whether voters went for the Democratic over the Republican candidate for state governor (which was on the same ballot.
The video is here:
And the (paywalled – just drop me a line if you cannot access it) paper, in the journal Public Budgeting & Finance, is here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-5850.2005.00374.x
Thank you, Michael. Good to see it laid out so clearly.
I was not able to download the PDF of your article on “voting for arts funding.” I am very much interested in reading it.
Jerry Yoshitomi
Please email to meaningmatters@gmail.com