Does Voting Have Upstream and Downstream Consequences? Evidence from Compulsory Voting in Brazil
63 Pages Posted: 19 Jul 2016
Date Written: July 13, 2016
Abstract
Economists, political scientists, policy-makers, and practitioners have long examined voting: paying a great deal of attention to questions like, “who votes?”, “why do people vote?”, and “how can we get more people to vote?” However, few have considered whether getting people to vote changes their broader attitudes and non-voting behaviors. In this paper, we use Brazil’s compulsory voting system to consider the effect of a large exogenous increase in voting on young citizens’ political interest, associational memberships, social awareness, and political knowledge in the lead up to the first compulsory voting experience (“upstream”) and in the months after (“downstream”). Using a unique, large dataset and a quasi-experimental strategy based on an exact-date-of-birth discontinuity design, we show that voting has little to no upstream or downstream effects on measurable attitudes, values and non-voting behaviors. These results suggest that while voting may be an important behavior in its own right, it may have much smaller transformative effects over the average individual than previously thought.
Keywords: voter turnout, civic engagement, compulsory voting, regression discontinuity
JEL Classification: P16, D02, D72
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation