On Super-Rationality and the School Voting Process
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Description
Paul Portney and Jon Sonstelie have written a stimulating paper in which voters in school millage elections are not only rational in considering the direct consumption of benefits of education, but super-rational as well, in the sense that they respond to expected capital gains associated with changes in property values. The issues raised by the paper and my comments about them can best be divided into three parts. Frist, I argue that the authors suggest a number of interesting theoretical questions, which link the local public spending and voting literatures, and thereby point to some potentially fruitful areas of research. Second, I argue that the empirical evidence presented by the authors does not provide a good test of their super-rationality hypothesis, and finally, I present some independent data which help to shed some light on the subject and which in the process suggest just how difficult it might be to obtain a good test of super-rationality.
Source Publication
Collective Decision Making: Applications from Public Choice Theory
Source Editors/Authors
Clifford S. Russell
Publication Date
1979
Recommended Citation
Rubinfeld, Daniel L., "On Super-Rationality and the School Voting Process" (1979). Faculty Chapters. 1875.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1875
