Abstract
Electoral rules are assumed to influence turnout. However, assessing this empirically is challenging because they rarely change and, when they do, counterfactuals are hard to come by. In 2012, Chile moved from voluntary and permanent registration and mandatory voting to automatic registration and voluntary voting. We study how electoral rules influence turnout by analyzing variations in turnout for presidential elections before and after this reform, with an original approach and using novel data. We estimate changes attributable to voluntary voting among the registered population as the increase in abstention rates among them and changes attributable to both automatic registration and voluntary voting among the non-registered population as the increase in turnout among them. We estimate counterfactual abstention and registration rates based on past behavior and use bounds to account for uncertainty. Our estimates suggest that while automatic registration and voluntary voting brought 7.1% of eligible population who were unregistered to the polls, voluntary voting pulled away 12% who were previously registered. The explicit purposes of this reform were to increase turnout and reduce the age bias in voting. We estimate a reduction in turnout of almost 5% of eligible population and a 39% reduction in the age bias of voters.
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Notes
History of Law No 20.568.
The reform to the Constitution was approved in 2009, backed by then President Bachelet, the leader of the center-left coalition. The new law was approved in 2012, backed by then President Piñera, the leader of the center-right coalition. This bill was approved by a large majority: in the Senate, it had 25 votes in favor, 8 against, and 3 abstentions.
The reason why they use the 2004 municipal election instead of the 2008 one for comparison is unclear.
Indeed, the propensity to treatment is deterministic in the year: while no observations were subject to voluntary voting in 2004, all observations were under voluntary voting in 2012.
Note that due to the structure of the data, the use of 2009 as a baseline already accounts for population changes between 2009 and 2013. Specifically, the data looks at 2013 registered individuals, so that people who died between elections do not appear, while people who turned voting age (18) do. Also, note that we observe previous registration status for all individuals registered in 2013, regardless of whether they changed the municipality where they live or moved from one age group to another.
We define the change in the number of people in the electoral roll during the period as the total of people who registered for the first time, minus those who died in the period. We estimate the number of dead by applying mortality rates by age and sex (INE 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014) to the age-sex structure of the 2009 electoral roll.
In the calculations, the estimate of people who register in the group is bounded by the number of people who were not registered. For simplicity, this is not expressed in the formula here.
Based on the data, cohorts are defined as the group of 18–19 years old, then groups of 5-year ranges, and finally a group for those older than 80, totaling 14 age groups.
Similarity is assessed following the classification of municipalities developed by the Secretariat for Regional and Administrative Development (Subdere). Municipalities are classified into eight categories based on population, percentage of rural population, poverty rate, and the income share coming from the Municipal Common Fund (Subdere, 2014). These variables are usually employed in the analysis of turnout at the municipal level (Bargsted et al., 2013; Bucarey et al., 2013; Corvalán & Cox, 2015). Online Appendix 2 explains how we imputed missing values in this typology (corresponding to 3.5% of municipalities).
For the last three presidential elections before the reform (1999, 2005, and 2009), the average difference in turnout with the previous presidential election was 1.5 points, whereas the difference with the previous municipal election was 1.85 points.
The even more demanding approach presented in Online Appendix 3 also yields significant results for both changes.
The minimum bound for the net change is the maximum bound for the effect of automatic registration minus the minimum bound for the change attributable to voluntary voting, and vice versa.
Indeed, there is no need to assume political disengagement of younger cohorts for this to happen, since registration rates are strictly increasing in age (Ansolabehere, 2012).
The adjustments for the combined change of automatic registration among the non-registered are based on previous registration rates for the corresponding age group, while in the case of voluntary voting, the adjustment assumes constant turnout by age groups. Annual registration rates are small among older cohorts because most of them were registered. Thus, the estimates of bounds for the effects of automatic registration with voluntary voting among the non-registered, which are based on possible registration rates, are narrower among older cohorts when calculated as absolute numbers and as a fraction of population, but wider when calculated as a fraction of the previously non-registered population (because the denominator is small).
Slightly negative point estimates of this change mean that the increase in voters was less than would have been projected according to previous registration rates. This may be a result of the assumption that the proportion of registrations that correspond to first-time registrations in all groups was 54% of total registries. If first-time registries are less frequent among the old, true registration rates for this group are overestimated, leading to smaller estimated changes.
Although there were nine candidates, Michelle Bachelet, from the center-left coalition, led polls all year and the center-right coalition could only officially nominate a candidate, Evelyn Matthei, almost 2 months away from election day.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Chilean Electoral Service for providing data for this research through Oficio Ord. No. 2755 of 2014. This research did not receive any specific Grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. We thank Centro de Estudios Públicos for supporting this research. We are indebted to Harald Beyer, Alejandro Corvalán, Andrés Hernando, Daniel Hidalgo, Carmen Le Foulon, Bernardo Mackenna, Slaven Razmilic, and Ben Schneider for valuable comments. We also thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We thank Valentina Salvatierra for her superb assistance in editing the draft of this article. All mistakes are our own.
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Cox, L., Gonzalez, R. Fewer but Younger: Changes in Turnout After Voluntary Voting and Automatic Registration in Chile. Polit Behav 44, 1911–1932 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09788-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09788-0