Abstract
Do public employees vote more frequently than private employees? The turnout of public employees has been of central interest to public choice scholars for almost a century. Utilizing a government records dataset that is not subject to over-reporting and differential social desirability bias, we find that public employees voted 11–12 percentage points more than their counterparts in the private sector. In a multivariate analysis, however, the effect is only four to five percentage points greater for local government public employees, which is in the lower range of previous studies. We are able to distinguish between local government and central government employees and show that the latter vote two percentage points less than the former. Controlling for the specific type of educational background does not explain the public–private turnout differential. Finally, the effect of working and voting in the same municipality is larger for local government employees than other citizens. This is in accordance with their greater incentives as they elect their future employer, though the effect size is surprisingly small.
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Notes
Along with the municipal elections, there were simultaneous elections for the five regional councils (the regions primarily control the public hospitals and, unlike the municipalities, regions are not able to collect taxes). Our focus exclusively is the municipal elections. Turnout is roughly identical in the two types of elections—very few individuals vote at one election and not the other (Elklit and Kjær 2009). It is therefore important to note that individuals who are mobilized for the regional elections are also likely to vote in the elections under study.
In 39 municipalities there were no missing districts or voters at all. In Rudersdal, one district was missing, in Copenhagen one table in one district was missing (voters are assigned randomly to tables) and in Aarhus six districts were missing. In all cases the municipalities had lost the ballots after they were counted. Esbjerg participated only with those districts with electronic voting. In all four municipalities, there was no self-selection involved, and the missing districts/tables should therefore not pose a problem for the analysis. In one municipality, Odense, the electronic registration in district 4 broke down after a couple of hours. This resulted in 1,160 voters erroneously being coded as non-voters. Excluding district 4 in Odense does not alter any of the main conclusions (Bhatti and Hansen 2010).
Though we are able to distinguish between central and local government employees, we cannot further divide local government employees into regional and municipal employees. This should not be a problem in the two first parts of the analysis as regional elections were held simultaneously with the municipal elections under investigation. Thus, regional and municipal employees faced roughly the same incentives to vote.
More than 37,000 (in fact 37,426) individuals were registered as being employed in two sectors and 540 in three sectors. These individuals were excluded from the study to avoid duplication. If the individuals were included and results were clustered by individuals to take into account individuals appearing more than once due to multiple affiliations (i.e., if an individual was registered as both a private and local government employee, she would appear in the analysis twice but in one cluster), the results would be almost identical to those presented. Nearly 1.4 million (1,369,752, to be precise) individuals were either not employed or had no registered sector affiliation.
The B term is often divided into two components: (1) the benefit of the voter’s preferred outcome (B) and (2) the probability of becoming the pivotal voter (P). However, this division is not so important in the present case, since the probability of deciding the outcome is expected to be roughly invariant (and infinitesimally small) across the employment groups. A separate term (D) for civic duty is also often included (Riker and Ordeshook 1968).
Comparable results are found in a similar study by the same authors (Garand et al. 1991a) though the bivariate differential reaches 17 to 23 percentage points for the election year 1986.
Entirely ruling out this possibility would require panel data (or, even better, some sort of random assignment to employment). We return to this in the conclusion.
The inability of including attitudinal variables is a downside of government records datasets. If there are attitudinal variables that are causally prior to our main variables of interest (sector of employment) and related to the dependent variable, we may obtain biased estimates. However, it should be noted that is not clear that it would be appropriate to include attitudes for the present purpose as commonly used opinions, such as attitudes towards the public sector, party identification, and party vote could partially be a consequence of sector of employment rather than a cause of it.
Ideally, one should only investigate the municipal employees in H2, since regional employees vote for their employer as long as they live in the same region; however, this is not possible given the information available in the dataset. Thus, our results for this hypothesis (but not H1) could be attenuated slightly due to the noise from the regional employees.
There are substantial differences in the educational backgrounds of employees in the three sectors examined, so including the dummies can potentially be important. To take some examples: There are twice as many political scientists in the Danish local government sector as in the private sector (when taken relative to the sectors’ sizes), while the distribution of individuals with law degrees is 2:1 in favor of the private sector. Biologists are an example of an educational group which approximately equally represented in local governments and in the private sector. The number of variables corresponds to the number of individual educational types registered (e.g., political science, medicine and economy at the university etc.). We include all as separate dummies to take the educational types into account in as a fine-grained way as possible.
One caveat is that the interaction could be slightly attenuated due to our inability to distinguish between municipal and regional employees.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at seminars at the Danish Institute of Governmental Research and University of Copenhagen. We are also indebted to André Blais, Wouter van der Brug, Mark Franklin, Karina Kosiara-Pedersen, Asmus Leth Olsen and the anonymous reviewers for very useful comments and suggestions. Our gratitude also goes to The Danish Ministry for Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs and the Danish Ministry of Interior and Health for funding the project and to the participating municipalities for graciously providing the voter files free of charge. Jon Jay Neufeld proofread the manuscript. None of the individuals or institutions mentioned would necessarily endorse this study or should be held responsible for its content.
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Bhatti, Y., Hansen, K.M. Public employees lining up at the polls—the conditional effect of living and working in the same municipality. Public Choice 156, 611–629 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-9919-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-9919-y