With each proxy season wilder than the last, keeping track of how funds vote becomes more important. The Corporate Library has now published their analysis of how mutual funds voted last year. The report analyzes the 2006 voting records of 29 large mutual fund families, which includes the voting records of 702 funds, amounting to more than 1.2 million voting decisions.

Here are some of the study's findings:

- Funds supported 92% of management-sponsored proposals in 2006 on average, up from 89% in 2004. A small number of management resolutions propose reforms that shareholders have called for in the past, yet receive much higher support when proposed by management. For example: Dreyfus, which voted in favor of no shareholder resolutions to declassify the board in 2006, voted for 98% of management proposals to adopt the same reform.

- Putnam was the fund family least likely to support management-sponsored resolutions, with an average 79% support. American and Ameriprise had the highest levels of support for management resolutions, with average support of 97%.

- Funds voted in favor of 37% of shareholder-sponsored resolutions, on average. Governance-related resolutions, which comprised 76% of all shareholder-sponsored resolutions published in proxies in 2006, received 44% support from funds. This figure has increased over the three years spanned by this study for 14 of the largest fund families, from 37% in 2004.

- Among shareholder resolutions, those proposing board declassification received the highest level of fund support – 87.7%, on average – in the 2006 proxy season. The largest category of shareholder resolution, those urging majority affirmative support for uncontested director elections, achieved 60% support from funds, on average, up significantly over the past three years.