Opinion Change or Differential Turnout: Austin’s Budget Feedback Exercise and the Police Department

Lodewijk L. Gelauff, Ashish Goel

Abstract:

In 2020, the United States was shaken up by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement and protests around the country intensified, asking for defunding or reallocation of police budgets. This happened in the middle of a budgeting feedback exercise for the City of Austin, where residents were able to share opinions on the budgets of various city service areas, including the Police Department. The number of daily responses increased by a hundredfold overnight and we find that the votes cast after the “exogenous shock” were overwhelmingly in favor of reducing police funding, redirecting those funds mostly to healthcare and housing. After we submitted a report describing the results from the 2020 exercise, the City published a new proposal that redirected a meaningful portion of the police budget, and the amount redirected was in line with the aggregated budget presented in the report.

In this paper, we present the data from the budget feedback exercise, and analyze the shifts in the respondent demographics that accompanied the exogenous shock. We also report on the results from a more limited budgetary feedback exercise in 2021, and a brief follow-up survey. This analysis suggests that the opinion shift that we observed around the shock is a structural change that persisted beyond 2020, and that the opinion gap on police funding widened. Finally, we show how clustering the opinions of the participant pool offers additional insights into the nature of the shift – the change in participation rates across different clusters after the shock was much more pronounced than changes across demographic groups. This has important potential consequences for how to take minority opinion into account in civic feedback processes.