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The Impact of Procedural Information Costs on Voting: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Chile

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Abstract

This paper uses a natural experiment to identify the effect of a procedural information cost on the electoral registration of young first-time voters. We exploit the fact that information about when the minimum age eligibility requirement is due, either at registration or election-day, is only meaningful for those turning 18 after registration closing day. Using a national dataset on Chilean registration over four elections, we provide evidence of a sharp discontinuity in the registration rate of those youngsters turning 18 at closing date. The effect is both sizable and robust, persists over time, and is similar across income groups.

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Notes

  1. The relation between political information and turnout has received broad theoretical (Matsusaka 1995; Feddersen and Pesendorfer 1996; Ghirardato and Katz 2006) and empirical, attention (Thomas and Poole 1987; Lassen 2005; Larcinese 2007; Morton et al. 2015).

  2. Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980). In 37 out of 90 countries other than the US, registration is self-initiated (http://aceproject.org).

  3. For instance, the correlation across municipalities between the number of registrations and votes, for the 2009 Presidential election, was 99%.

  4. “Data” Section informs about the sources for data on the number of registrations and births.

  5. See Rosenstone and Wolfinger (1978), Highton (2004), and Burden and Neiheisel (2013).

  6. This principle underlies the “motor voter” programs in the US, which reduce the impact of administrative costs by bundling two different activities.

  7. From the Arizona voter guide in http://www.azvoterguide.com/faqs/. We found similar FAQ in registration websites of other ten states in the US, as well as registration websites in the UK, South Africa and Hong Kong.

  8. This unusual combination is unique in the world: most countries have either automatic registration with voluntary voting (e.g., Germany, Britain), both voluntary registration and voluntary voting (the United States), or automatic registration and compulsory voting (Belgium).

  9. As a matter of fact, many individuals moved to other counties without updating their registration addresses. A survey in 2013 showed that 11% of the population was “misregistered”; that is, registered in a county other than the one they lived in (Centro de Estudios Públicos, CEP, survey N 69 2013).

  10. We found evidence of this in the discussion of the 17,824 Electoral Law in 1970.

  11. In the next section, narrow bandwidths are selected to implement local estimations.

  12. The polynomial order is 4.

  13. All results are robust to the use of other bandwidths, as Imbens and Kalyanaraman (2012).

  14. We combine data of several elections in order to have more observations in each of the days close to the discontinuity.

  15. As in Table 2, we notice that the ratio between R0 and the constant is lower for presidential elections, when compared to the coefficients of municipal ones.

  16. The values of the coefficient for T = 0 and T = 6 are, in absolute values, 132.25 and 47.35, respectively.

  17. See Mitchell and Wlezien (1995); Timpone (1998); Knack and White (2000); Nickerson (2015).

  18. A related variable is “occupation” at the time of registration, but almost all young first-time voters were “students” when their registration was performed.

  19. We use the latest CASEN because socioeconomic variables change very little over time. We tried different survey years, obtaining similar results.

  20. See Corvalan and Cox 2013; Contreras et al. 2016.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Loreto Cox, Eduardo Engel and Alfredo Joignant for their helpful comments and suggestions. We thank Pedro Cayul for outstanding research assistance. Corvalan acknowledges financial support from the Millennium Institute for Research in Market Imperfections and Public Policy, ICM IS130002, Chile. We thank Florencia Torche for sharing birth rates data with us.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economic Department, Universidad Diego Portales, Santa Clara 797, Huechuraba, Santiago, Chile

    Alejandro Corvalan

  2. Banco Central de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Paulo Cox

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  1. Alejandro Corvalan
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  2. Paulo Cox
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Correspondence to Alejandro Corvalan.

Additional information

Replication data may be accessed at Political Behavior Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/HRUGSI.

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Corvalan, A., Cox, P. The Impact of Procedural Information Costs on Voting: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Chile. Polit Behav 40, 3–19 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9389-5

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