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Compulsory Voting Can Increase Political Inequality: Evidence from Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Gabriel Cepaluni  and
F. Daniel Hidalgo
Gabriel Cepaluni
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, São Paulo State University, São Paulo, SP 01225-010, Brazil
F. Daniel Hidalgo*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
*
e-mail: dhidalgo@mit.edu
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Abstract

One of the most robust findings on political institutions is that compulsory voting (CV) reduces the participation gap between poorer and wealthier voters. We present evidence that in Brazil, the largest country to use such a rule, CV increases inequality in turnout. We use individual-level data on 140 million Brazilian citizens and two age-based discontinuities to estimate the heterogeneous effects of CV by educational achievement, a strong proxy for socioeconomic status. Evidence from both thresholds shows that the causal effect of CV on turnout among the more educated is at least twice the size of the effect among those with less education. To explain this result, which is the opposite of what is predicted by the existing literature, we argue that nonmonetary penalties for abstention primarily affect middle- and upper-class voters and thus increase their turnout disproportionately. Survey evidence from a national sample provides evidence for the mechanism. Our results show that studies of CV should consider nonmonetary sanctions, as their effects can reverse standard predictions.

Type
Letters
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Spring 2016 , pp. 273 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Thanks to seminar participants at the MIT Political Science Experimental Lunch, attendees and discussant at our panel at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Asociation, and attendees at the Grupo de Economia Política (GEP) at the University of Sao Paulo. Replication data are available on the Political Analysis Dataverse at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/N2I9LC. Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

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