All of the Above

Abstract

Public sector pension funding varies significantly across the states, a phenomenon often linked with budget conditions, but do political factors also play a role? Utilizing data collected between 2000 and 2008, this article investigates the role of political, fiscal, and workforce characteristics as determinants of long-term pension funding, a measure with implications for fiscal sustainability and ongoing reform deliberations. Results suggest a significant relationship between pension funding and legislative partisanship, citizen ideology, public school employee coverage, and outstanding state debt. Certain other fiscal variables do not shape pension-funding levels independent of these factors, nor does executive partisanship.

Keywords

pension retirement politics fiscal policy

Introduction

In the past few years, state and local governments have made increased efforts to tackle the budgetary consequences of public sector retirement pensions. Investment volatility, escalating costs, and growing liabilities have increased attentiveness among lawmakers, public employees, journalists, and the public. Long a staple of public sector compensation, the political and fiscal security once afforded pensions has vanished in many jurisdictions, as policymakers confront a trade-off between meeting pension funding commitments and allocating scarce revenues to other programs, a circumstance exasperated by the Great Recession.

Perhaps because of the inherent trade-off, pensions have emerged as a polarizing issue at the elite and mass levels. Many public employees and their beneficiaries expect employer-sponsored income support in old age, a phase of life in which most are unable to retain full-time employment, and thus express frustration at efforts to alter existing pensions. That frustration is often greater in locales where public employees are not covered by social security. But many taxpayers, a majority of whom work in the private sector and do not enjoy the same type of retirement benefits, balk at assuming responsibility for public employee pension costs. Legislative and executive actors are situated in between, desiring a competent, motivated workforce but cognizant that shifting demographics and tax bases render it difficult to fulfill pension promises made in decades prior.

As a result, much of the interest in pensions focuses on their long-term funding status. Although often described in the aggregate as lacking, pensions’ fiscal health in reality varies substantially across the states. A recent study from the Pew Center on the States (2012) found that in fiscal year 2010 just sixteen states had prefunded 80 percent or more of their future pension liabilities. But this variable, referred to as the pension-funded ratio, ranged from a low of 45 percent in Illinois to a high of 100 percent in Wisconsin. In other words, Illinois in 2010 had funded less than half of the state’s estimated future pension cost while Wisconsin had fully funded its obligations—a considerable range, indeed.

Why is pension funding so inconsistent? Most studies focus on the role of budgetary conditions, workforce characteristics or differences in pensions’ administrative structure, paying little attention to potential partisan or ideological effects on pension funding. This article takes a more comprehensive approach to pension funding, one that incorporates political variables alongside economic and program-specific measures and tests their influence on funded ratios. The next section provides a deeper context for this dependent variable. A series of independent variables that theoretically affect the funded ratio are then described. Quantitative results follow and are discussed in conclusion.

The Pension Funded Ratio in Context

Pension plans render annual estimates of future benefits owed to participants (x) and also make regular valuations of the assets held in trust to finance those benefits (y). The pension-funded ratio is simply y divided by x. If y > x, the ratio is greater than 1.00 and the plan is said to be overfunded; if y < x, the ratio is less than 1.00 and the plan is said to be underfunded; and if y = x, the ratio is 1.00 and the plan is characterized as fully funded.¹

The funded ratio can be interpreted as the degree to which a state or other pension sponsor has prefunded future pension obligations, an outcome with clear implications for fiscal sustainability. Sponsors of pensions with higher funded ratios, suggesting a greater portion of future costs has already been earmarked, will have lower long-term pension costs because there is less, if any, need to subsidize an underfunded plan. On the other hand, sponsors with lower funded ratios are likely to incur elevated long-term costs because of the continual need to finance benefit payments while closing the “funding gap,” that is, the difference between pension assets and liabilities (x − y). Increased spending on pensions will, in an environment of static revenue availability, have a crowding-out effect on appropriations to other budget areas. Consequently, pension funding may eventually affect tax rates and how third parties judge states’ ability to repay debt (cf. Coyle 2012).

Utilizing the funded ratio as a dependent variable avoids the difficulty of evaluating pension assets and liabilities separately, which historically were not measured consistently by states but have grown more uniform in calculation since the late 1990s and early 2000s (Mitchell et al. 2001; Steffen 2001). As such, the measure is frequently used in studies of pension funding (e.g., Butt 2012; Chaney, Copley, and Stone 2002; Giertz and Papke 2007; Johnson 1997; Lahey et al. 2008; Mitchell and Smith 1994; Munnell, Aubry, and Quinby 2011; Peng 2004).

Some states have demonstrably higher funded ratios than others, a phenomenon that itself likely has several causes. For example, some legislatures are more proactive at rectifying low funded ratios or maintaining already high funding, perhaps through supplemental contributions or a faithful adherence to actuarially determined pension contributions. Other legislatures and some state governors have used pensions as a “safety valve” with which to relieve general fund deficits. Some have failed to remit pension contributions altogether, while others have avoided paying full contribution amounts. Still other pension sponsors have altered appropriations formulas to reduce expenses, transferred assets from pensions to other programs, or some combination of these mechanisms, all of which have an adverse impact on pension assets and hence funded ratios (Mitchell and Smith 1994; Munnell et al. 2008; Retkwa 1990; Schneider 2005). Such actions may be prompted by the need to comply with spending-restrictive rules and, when the need to fund pensions is juxtaposed against other spending demands, may also be reflective of decisionmakers’ policy preferences.

Independent Variables and Data

Overview

Supported by anecdotal evidence and previous research, intuition suggests that pension funding is fundamentally linked with state budget conditions. Beyond the economic environment, endogenous structural factors of pensions and the covered workforce, such as the numbers of active and retired employees, may also affect long-term funding levels. But regardless of these characteristics, funding choices are rendered by political actors in fiscal policy-making institutions. Those actors have, on ideological grounds, different policy preferences and thus potentially different levels of commitment to public sector pensions. The following sections outline a series of independent variables intended to capture these three broad categories at the state level. Readers interested in a more fully developed theoretical argument are referred to this article’s online supplement.

Political and Institutional Measures

Executive and legislative partisanship are modeled to test their influence on funded ratios, with the latter separated into upper and lower chamber variables. Executive partisanship is measured with a dummy variable (1 = Democratic governor). To control for varying levels of executive influence on fiscal policy making, the Krause and Melusky (2012) indicator for whether or not the governor has unilateral executive budget control, that is, power over both revenue estimates and budget development, is further included. Legislative partisanship is entered as the proportion of seats held by Democrats in each chamber. Because length of tenure may affect policymakers’ inclination toward funding long-term commitments like pensions, states with legislative term limits are coded with a dummy variable (1 = term limit state). Finally, the Berry et al. (2010) measure of state citizen ideology is included as a proxy for public opinion. A separate variable for government ideology is not included in order to avoid redundancy with the executive and legislative partisanship variables.

Fiscal and Budgetary Conditions

Four variables linked with states’ fiscal environment are of theoretical interest to pension-funding outcomes. First, total debt per capita captures each state’s outstanding debt load apart from pension obligations. Second, a state’s annual percentage change in revenue per capita measures ability to finance pension costs and unfunded liabilities. Third is a control for whether or not each state has a constitutional balanced budget requirement (BBR; 1 = BBR). And fourth, a per capita gross state product (GSP) is included to control for economic differences across the states and as a proxy for economic and tax capacity.

Pension and Workforce Indicators

Several plan characteristics are of relevance to funding outcomes. The model includes dummy variables for whether or not each plan provides coverage to public school employees (1 = Yes), whether the plan is maintained alongside a competing defined contribution plan (1 = Yes), if the state constitution contains protections for earned pension benefits (1 = Yes), and if public employees are granted mandatory collective bargaining rights by the state constitution (1 = Yes). The ratio of active to retired public employees covered by each plan is included to gauge the effect of workforce age.

Data Sources and Exclusions

Pension data were available from the Wisconsin Legislative Council’s biannual Comparative Study of Major Public Employee Retirement Systems, which contains information on public employee pension plans in each state. All other data were drawn from Klarner (2003), respective authors’ websites, state websites, and the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The Council’s data from 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 were used to construct a cross-sectional panel of state employee pension funds.² Nebraska is excluded because that state’s pension fund is a defined contribution plan with no funded ratio. The Council’s studies include data taken from pension plans that solely benefit local municipal employees. This article’s state-centric framework necessitates exclusion of such “local-only” plans, since funding is sourced at the municipal level and the relationship between state political indicators and local funding decisions is weak. A descriptive table of all variables is included in the online supplement.

Method

A consequence of having a limited period of analysis over which to evaluate pension-funding measures that are determined consistently across the states is that many of the independent variables do not fluctuate significantly within each state. This article’s primary research question concerns covariate effects on outcome differences across the states, where variability is more considerable. As Savchak and Barghothi (2007) note in their analysis of decision making by state Supreme Court justices, this suggests that a random effects model is an appropriate methodological choice (cf. Provost 2006). While random effects models generally offer more efficient parameter estimates (Kennedy 2003), other estimation techniques are utilized as a robustness check in the online supplement. Collinearity does not appear to be problematic. The highest Pearson correlation coefficient is, not surprisingly, between the legislative chamber partisanship variables, but the associated variance inflation factors are between 3.0 and 4.0, less than the problematic levels described in methods texts (e.g., Greene 2003). Results are corrected for first-order serial correlation, which was confirmed with a Durbin–Watson test (statistic = 0.730).

Results

Judging on the basis of the three variable categories, results initially suggest that funded ratios between 2000 and 2008 were mostly shaped by political conditions and structural characteristics but not by the selected budgetary indicators. There is no evidence that per capita GSP, revenue changes, or the presence of a constitutional BBR had any independent effect on long-term pension funding. The nonsensitivity of funded ratios to the latter is perhaps not surprising; scholarly opinion has generally failed to agree on spending restrictive rules’ effect on fiscal outcomes.³

However, state debt load affected funded ratios. States with higher total outstanding debt per capita had lower funded ratios relative to their peers with less debt. The variable did not have a linear relationship with funded ratios; instead, the effect was quadratic. Diagnostic testing with Box-Tidwell regressions suggested a fifth-root transformation was appropriate. Combined with the negative regression coefficient, this indicates that as per capita state debt increases, the effect on the funded ratio increases in a curvilinear fashion.

Coefficients for political characteristics suggest that funded ratios are sensitive to both partisanship and the institutional fiscal policy-making context. While neither executive Democratic partisanship nor executive budget influence are significant, both legislative chamber partisanship coefficients are each strongly so. Whereas Democratic partisanship in states’ lower legislative chambers has a negative effect, Democratic upper chamber influence is positive but of lesser magnitude. The overall effect of Democratic partisanship is just over negative 2 percentage points (−0.425 + 0.402 = −0.023), which conflicts with the expectation that the party would have a positive effect on funded ratios.⁴

Caution is in order when interpreting this specific result. Each legislative partisanship variable was measured in a continuous fashion as the proportion of total seats held by Democratic identifiers. The reductive legislative influence on funded ratios of −0.023 suggests, ceteris paribus, a pension in a state with 100 percent Democratic legislative control would theoretically have a funded ratio 0.023 or 2.3 percent lower on average than a state with no Democratic legislators at all. A more realistic scenario, perhaps 50 percent Democratic population in each chamber, suggests a negative effect of lesser magnitude, on average 1.15 percent (50 percent of −0.023 = −0.0115). In the same vein, states with higher citizen liberalism—even after controlling for institutional partisanship—operate pensions with lower funded ratios, a result that dovetails with that for Democratic partisanship. The negative influence across these measures confers some evidence of internal consistency within the model and between the political phenomena the model seeks to identify.

Turning away from political factors, the strongly significant and positive coefficient for mandatory collective bargaining indicates that states with constitutional language extending this privilege to public employees manage pensions with stronger long-term funding. The size of the effect is about 9 percentage points and may be indicative of greater labor union policy influence in states with mandatory collective bargaining. Yet surprisingly, there is no positive influence from constitutional protections of pension benefits themselves. The indicator may be weakly associated with pension funding or, alternatively, any causality is absorbed by the collective bargaining variable.

The largest absolute effect on funded ratios comes not from political or budgetary factors but from whether or not the state plan includes benefits for public school employees. The independent effect of school employee coverage is 0.100, indicating that plans including this particular public sector constituency have funded ratios that average 10 percentage points higher than plans that cover only general state employees or state and local employees together. This positive effect may be a product of stronger advocacy from public teacher unions, the likelihood of financial inputs from state governments as well as local public school districts, or both.

Discussion

Public sector pensions have emerged as a polarizing issue, but what can be said about the relationship between states’ political environments and pension funding over the past decade? Elements of public choice theory, the strong literature connecting politics with variability in other policy domains and contemporary disputes over public sector compensation give rise to a conventional wisdom that surmises a Democratic presence in budgetary institutions should be positively related to long-term pension funding. But funding may also be shaped by fiscal and economic constraints, structural features of pension plans, or workforce characteristics.

The preceding analyses suggest that the conventional wisdom has limited empirical support. There is some evidence that political forces have an effect on long-term pension funding, but the influence is limited. Only one fiscal policy-making institution had an effect on funded ratios—the state legislature. Greater proportions of Democrats in states’ upper chambers correspond to higher funded ratios but, paradoxically, the effect is overwhelmed by lower chamber Democratic partisanship. The net effect under realistic population assumptions is negative 2.3 percentage points on average, a result sure to irk leaders of organized labor who invest millions of dollars in campaign support to convey the necessity of electing Democrats to protect public worker benefits. And it will surely rankle those leaders’ opponents who complain that Democrats do public sector unions’ bidding with the public purse.

Conflicting preferences between executive and legislative institutions is not without precedent in American politics. In fact, the phenomenon has received considerable scholarly examination (e.g., Barrilleaux and Berkman 2003; Ka and Teske 2002; Rose 2010; Wagner 2001). A traditional explanation is that, since governors aim to serve wide constituencies but legislators do not, the nonsensitivity of pension funding—a program that benefits a narrow segment of the public—to executive partisanship is entirely expected. Conversely, Peterson (1995) suggests institutional distinctions may be likely where the policy in question offers targeted benefits but decentralized cost distribution—again, like pensions—with higher likelihood of legislative influence on programs of this nature. The models estimated in this article, and a model robustness check available in the online supplement, offer empirical evidence that this may be true of public sector pensions as well. However, the negative influence of Democratic legislative partisanship questions the effectiveness of rent-seeking activities theorized to take place between that party’s members and public sector labor unions.

Policy divergence between institutions within the legislative branch has also been documented. According to Shepsle et al. (2009), the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate exhibit countercyclical behaviors with respect to appropriations. They argue that the Senate’s electoral cycle impacts that chamber’s appropriations behavior but that the House moderates this bias by two-thirds. Yet in the present study, legislative term limits had no strongly significant effect on funded ratios, questioning the rationale that electoral concerns affect policy decisions regarding pension funding. While data availability was incompatible with the period analyzed, the legislative divergence suggested in Table 1 and in the online supplement may be related to differences in professionalism (Clucas 2007; cf. Coggburn and Kearney 2010) or it may be symptomatic of different fiscal policy preferences. Most public sector pensions have a substantial portion of future obligations already earmarked and invested, a condition that is rare in other areas where “pay as you go” financing is the norm. It is plausible that lower chamber Democrats are more cognizant of that fact, diverting funds to other policy areas instead of public employee pensions, perhaps those with greater public visibility.

Table 1.

Factors Affecting Funded Ratios in Panel of State Pension Plans, 2000–2008.

	β	SE	p Value
Political and institutional measures
Executive partisanship (D)	0.003	0.017	.862
Unilateral executive budget control	0.022	0.020	.289
Upper chamber partisanship (D)	0.402	0.127	.001***
Lower chamber partisanship (D)	−0.425	0.133	.001***
Legislative term limits	0.045	0.027	.093*
Citizen liberalism	18.991	7.683	.013**
Fiscal and budgetary conditions
Total state debt per capita	−0.112	0.026	.000***
Annual revenue change per capita	−0.029	0.038	.433
Constitutional balanced budget requirement	−0.022	0.027	.414
Gross state product per capita	∼0	∼0	.202
Pension and workforce indicators
Public school employees covered	0.100	0.046	.029**
Ratio of active to retired employees	0.036	0.018	.059*
Competing defined contribution plan	0.025	0.029	.389
Constitutional pension benefit protection	−0.062	0.039	.113
Mandatory collective bargaining	0.090	0.030	.002***
Model statistics
Constant			1.370
Wald chi-square			75.93
R ², between			.444
R ², overall			.389
Observations			239

Note: Results are corrected for first-order autocorrelation. Forty-nine states are included in the model; Nebraska is the sole exclusion. New York did not report a funded ratio in 2000, 2002, 2004, or 2006 and is excluded for those years. To correct for nonlinearities, citizen ideology is transformed with an inverse square root and per capita state debt with a one-fifth root.

Estimation Method: Panel random effects regression, corrected for serial correlation.

*p ≤ .10. **p ≤ .05. ***p ≤ .01.

The preceding results also indicate that the long-term funded status of public sector pensions has no relationship to changes in revenue, BBRs, or state economic capacity. These variables may simply be poor representations of the budgetary phenomena suspected to affect pension funding. Or perhaps common budget variables are at best weakly related to public sector pension funding once political and pension-specific characteristics are accounted for. Regardless, the null results imply that pension funding may not be as closely related to fiscal conditions as theory and common sense dictate, thereby opening the door to other pressures, especially political influences on the political actors making appropriations decisions.

Conclusion

Public sector pensions do not suffer a lack of attention in contemporary policy discourse. Concerns have been repeatedly raised in recent years about the plans’ impact on state and local fiscal sustainability. The resultant increase in attentiveness has, in turn, raised curiosity about the antecedents of pension-funding differences across the states. Knowledge of such factors is necessary to foster a more comprehensive understanding of this emerging policy issue, where debates are often constrained by ideology and blurred by emotion, but where reform is both desired and needed in many jurisdictions.

This article presents evidence of a systematic, though limited association between state political factors and long-term pension funding, as well as outstanding debt and characteristics of the public sector workforce in question. These results underscore the body of extant research which links variation in policy outcomes to states’ political culture, especially when measured in terms of partisanship. Politics, it seems, does have an effect on certain aspects of public sector pension funding. Only sustained research in the coming years can conclude whether or not the relationships elucidated in the past broaden, narrow, or vanish.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Supplemental Material

The online appendices are available at .

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