The Power of Renewal: Status Quo Bias Impacts Voter Approval of School Spending Referendums

Abstract Status quo bias often impacts decisions about private goods and is hypothesized to influence voter choice. This paper offers a clean, direct, real‐world test of status quo bias's effect on voter support for school spending. We take advantage of a unique Minnesota rule that requires ballot language to disclose and distinguish between new and renewed property tax impacts of referendums. Using a novel dataset of 922 Minnesota school referendums from 2008 to 2023, we find that referendums that renew existing taxes receive 13.0–15.2 percentage points more support than referendums proposing new taxes, despite equivalent financial implications. This suggests that roughly 15% of voters are swayed by the status quo and rely on this simple cue instead of careful cost and benefit assessment. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that status quo bias is substantially weaker in high income or more educated districts.