Working Paper: NBER ID: w26440
Authors: Ethan Kaplan; Fernando Saltiel; Sergio S. Urzua
Abstract: This paper assesses if voting for democracy affects long-term electoral participation. We study the effects of participating in Chile's 1988 plebiscite, which determined whether democracy would be reinstated after a 15-year long military dictatorship. Taking advantage of individual-level voting data for upwards of 13 million Chileans, we implement an age-based RD design comparing long run registration and turnout rates across marginally eligible and ineligible individuals. We find that Plebiscite eligibility (participation) significantly increased electoral turnout three decades later, reaching 1.8 (3.3) percentage points in the 2017 Presidential election. These effects are robust to different specifications and distinctive to the 1988 referendum. We discuss potential mechanisms concluding that the scale of initial mobilization explains the estimated effects. We find that plebiscite eligibility induced a sizable share of less educated voters to register to vote compared to eligibles in other upstream elections. Since less educated voters tended to support Chile's governing left-wing coalition, we argue that the plebiscite contributed to the emergence of one party rule the twenty years following democratization.
Keywords: voting; democracy; electoral participation; Chile; plebiscite
JEL Codes: C21; D72; N46
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Eligibility to vote in the 1988 plebiscite (K16) | Increased electoral turnout three decades later (K16) |
| Eligibility to vote in the 1988 plebiscite (K16) | Increased turnout in the 2013 presidential election (D79) |
| Eligibility to vote in the 1988 plebiscite (K16) | Increased turnout in the 2017 presidential election (K16) |
| Eligibility to vote in the 1988 plebiscite (K16) | Increased turnout in the 2016 municipal election (H79) |
| Plebiscite mobilization (D72) | Increased registration of less educated voters (K16) |