Secondary Outcomes (end points)
The first secondary outcome of interest is a measure of general support for school spending. Respondents will be asked: "State legislatures must make choices when making spending decisions on important state programs. Would you like your legislature to increase or decrease spending on education?" Where the choices are "Greatly Increase", "Slightly Increase", "Maintain", "Slightly Decrease", and "Greatly Decrease." We will estimate the impact of the treatment on support for increasing school spending by combining the first two categories ("Greatly increase" and "Slightly Increase") into a single binary measure of support for increasing school spending vs. decreasing or maintaining. We will also examine whether the treatment influences support for decreasing school spending by combining the last two categories ("Greatly Decrease" and "Slightly Decrease") into a single binary measure of support for decreasing school spending vs. increasing or maintaining. Our analysis of their secondary outcome will test whether there are differences in the average rate of support for school spending between the treatment and control groups using ordinary least squares regression, controlling for county size, state, political orientation, and a set of demographic covariates to increase precision.
A second set of secondary outcomes are measures of which factors respondents considered as they decided whether to support the school bond. These outcome variables will be constructed from responses to the question, "Which of the following was on your mind as you decided whether to support or oppose the school bond proposition?" Respondents can select all that apply from the following choices: Teacher salaries, school building condition, academic achievement, technology in schools, property taxes, sales taxes, current school spending, overall government spending or the deficit, inflation, my local school board or district leadership, my state's department of education, and something else (write-in response).
Our exploratory analysis will assess whether and how our treatment changes the factors that respondents report considering as they decided whether to support the school bond measure (using ordinary least squares regression as described above). Additionally, we will use assignment to treatment as an instrument for considering a particular factor to estimate the direct effect of increasing consideration of/the salience of a given factor (e.g., property taxes, teacher salaries, district leadership, etc.) on support for the bond (and overall spending) via two-stage-least-squares instrumental variables regression.