@EdWorkingPaper{ai21-482,
title = "Elevating Education in Politics: How Teacher Strikes Shape Congressional Election Campaigns",
author = "Melissa Arnold Lyon, Matthew A. Kraft",
institution = "Annenberg Institute at Brown University",
number = "482",
year = "2021",
month = "October",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai21-482",
abstract = {Teacher strikes have gained national attention with the Ò#RedforEdÓ movement. Such strikes are polarizing events that could serve to elevate education as a political priority or cast education politics in a negative light. We investigate this empirically by collecting original panel data on U.S. teacher strikes, which we link to congressional election campaign advertisements. Election ads provide a useful window into political discourse because they are costly to sponsors, consequential for voter behavior, and predictive of future legislative agendas. Using a differences-in-differences framework, we find that teacher strikes dramatically increase education issue salience, with impacts concentrated among positively-framed ads. Effects are driven by strikes lasting only a few days and occurring in battleground areas with highly-contested elections.},
}