Voting with their (left and right) feet: Are homebuyers’ values of neighborhood environmental amenities consistent with their politics?

Abstract

There exists a consistent partisan gap in preferences for public spending on the environment, with approval being 20 to 40 percentage points higher for Democrats than Republicans. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a similar partisan gap present in residential preferences for environmental amenities. We link housing data, land use, and household characteristics, including voter registration, for three distinct housing markets, and we develop a residential sorting model to estimate marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) for residential proximity to conserved land, allowing for preference heterogeneity by partisanship as well as other household characteristics. For all households combined, we estimate average annual household MWTP for locations proximate to open space to range from $426 to $1061 across the three markets. In our model that allows for heterogeneous preferences across groups, we find no evidence that Republicans' MWTP is less than Democrats’ MWTP, and we statistically reject the magnitude of preference disparity found in voting studies. These findings establish a difference in relative preferences across venues that has implications for valuation research and political economy. To assess why relative preferences may differ across venues, we develop a simple theoretical model that applies to both housing and voting decisions and incorporates parameters for parochial altruism and tax aversion. Using prior estimates on partisan differences in key parameters, we find both intuitive and, to some extent, numerical support for the observed difference in relative preferences.