The economics of voting in Latin America

Voting is at the core of democracy, yet participation in elections remains an open question for both economists and political scientists. This project aims at investigating how do people decide whether to attend to the polls or abstain, and how do they choose which candidate to vote for. Using experimental techniques in two distinct settings (urban Perú and rural Paraguay), the project will place especial emphasis in the role social networks play in these decisions. In rural Paraguay, we will explore the role that governments can play in enhancing female participation in elections through different types of campaigns. On the one hand, a subset of randomly selected villages will receive a massive campaign raising awareness on the importance of being registered to vote, and of voting itself. On the other hand, a second subset of villages will receive a door-to-door campaign with a similar message as the first one, and we will experimentally vary the proportion of the population being treated. The experimental design will allow us to assess the cost-effectiveness of each of these widely used methods of campaigning. Even though the massive campaigns are cheaper to implement, personally speaking to voters in a door-to-door campaign can potentially do a better job in transmitting the information, while also allowing it to disseminate through social networks.

The second part of the project, which will take place in urban Peru, will investigate whether knowledge about the members of your social network’s candidate choice influences your own choice. Using novel experimental methods, we generate within network variation in the availability of information about your friend’s choice, and collect data on actual voting in a presidential election. The results of this project will not only shed light on the role of friend’s networks in politics but will also inform us about the mechanisms through which these effects might be working through.