Untenured associate for me! Good luck 🍀

Thank you <3

please do!

I did!!

Oh wow!! Thanks for covering our research (and making it go viral!!)

Thank you!

It's like Italy in 2011. not good (and guess who was the president)

The main conclusion we draw from this study is that even controversial reforms can be a political success if they benefit enough people. Our results also underscore the crucial role of institutions—in our case, unions—in shaping responses to policy. Thanks for reading!

Walker did best in districts with many young teachers (whose pay👆bc of Act 10 on avg) and a lot of families w/kids. But alsoin places with politically active unions pre-Act 10, which likely experienced the largest change in union participation to politics with the reform.

We then ask: what was it about Act 10 that drove votes to Walker? Was it the personal gains some people experienced, or was it the fact that unions were not around anymore to tell people how to vote? We find that it was both.

How do we show this? We look at political contributions of the 900K folks who signed the petition to initiate the recall election. Even among this group of staunch Walker opponents, Dem contributions fell and GOP contributions increased *at a higher rate* than among non-signers.

You may wonder: everyone knew about Act10. Why would exposure to it matter 4 how ppl voted? Great Q. The answer, we argue, is that Act10 got a lot of bad press from the get-go. However, upon exposure people likely saw some benefits from it and changed their mind.

How? The reform could only be implemented in a district after its pre-Act 10 CBA had expired. By the 2012 election, only some districts had experienced the law. We compare these with not-yet-exposed districts find that they drew support for the gov in terms of votes.

What about Walker? He actually did quite well despite the protests: won a recall election in 2012 (the first incumbent US governor to do so) and again a general election in 2014. But did he win *despite* Act 10 or *because* of Act 10? We argue he won *because* of Act 10.

We show that the reform was terrible for unions (revenues📉) and for some teachers, who saw their pay halt or even go down. However, some (younger) teachers benefited and, importantly, test scores went up in its aftermath. So the reform was bad for some and good for others.

Act 10 drastically changed collective bargaining and pay, part. for public teachers. It made it hard for unions to operate, prevented them from negotiating salary schedules, & gave districts flexibility to set T pay. The reform was met with major protests, which lasted months.

To answer this question we go to Wisconsin, a political battleground in every recent major election, and look at the political consequences of a very controversial public-sector reform of collective bargaining, Act 10 of 2011, championed by then-governor Scott Walker.