School board politics, school district size, and the bargaining power of teachers' unions

This paper presents a public choice theory of the bargaining power of teachers' unions. The theory predicts that the power of the unions rises with the size of a district. The theory is tested by examining the relationship between district size and various bargaining outcomes for a sample of 771 California school districts in 1999-2000. As hypothesized, teachers' salaries rise and the ratio of teachers per pupil falls with increasing district size. The paper also considers several alternative explanations for these results.