This article examines whether an increase in political participation biased toward low-income votersand concentrated in legislative electionsimpacts federal representatives' allocation of resources from the federal budget to Brazilian municipalities. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits the assignment of electronic voting to municipalities based on population size to identify the causal effect of enfranchisement on the allocation of federal public spending. We find that an increase of 1 percentage point in the valid-vote-to-turnout ratio for federal representatives in a municipality increases the allocation of funds from the federal budget by 3.3%, and that experienced politicians are more responsive to the enfranchisement of low-income voters.
This paper studies the effects of legislation in Brazil that banned the right to carry guns and provided for a voter referendum regarding whether to ban the sale of all firearms. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that gun-related homicides decreased by 12.2% and gunshot wounds that were ‘intended to kill’ by 16.3%, with the reduction of the former being especially pronounced in high-crime areas and among black males. There is no evidence of substitution effect as non-gun-related homicides were not affected. Two pieces of evidence suggest that the mechanism explaining this result is a decrease in the number of people carrying guns in response to the legislation: first, the number of cases of illegal gun carrying decreased and second, only gun-related homicides taking place outside the residence were reduced. Analysis of the subsequent voter referendum, which was defeated by a wide margin, shows stronger support for the complete firearms ban in the areas more affected by gun violence.
The growing political polarization and the increasing use of social media have been linked to straining social ties worldwide. The 2016 presidential elections in the United States reflected this trend with reports of fear and anxiety among voters. We examine how election results can be linked to episodes of anxiety through the use of alcohol as self‐medication. We analyze a daily dataset of household purchases of alcohol in the weeks following presidential elections. We find that, within 30 days from Election Day, a 10 percentage point increase in support for the losing candidate increases alcohol expenditure by 1.1%. The effect is driven by counties with a higher share of supporters of the losing candidate and is robust to controlling more flexibly for omitted variables related to alcohol consumption. The increase in alcohol consumption is present in the 2016 elections and absent in the previous three presidential elections.
This article reevaluates often-made assumptions of retrospective voting and voter irrationality in studies of voting behavior in political contexts colored by haphazard, apolitical events. To do so, it leverages the quasi-random 2015–2016 Zika epidemic in Brazil and the accompanying priming of “women’s issues” relating to infant health to empirically assess whether exposure to the virus increased political support for female candidates in the 2016 Brazilian local elections. Results of difference-in-difference analyses suggest that high incidences of the virus in the months immediately preceding the election increased female candidates’ vote shares. Conflicting with theories of irrational retrospective voting, the results are consistent with an understudied theory of rational prospective voting. Robustness and falsification tests and dubious support for alternative explanations lend additional support to the argument. The research contributes to an elucidation of both the complex calculations underlying voting behavior and the conditions favorable to female candidates’ electoral prospects.
Scholars concur that free and fair elections are essential for proper democratic functioning, but our understanding of the political effects of democratic voting systems is incomplete. This article mitigates the gap by exploiting the gradual transformation of voting systems and ballot structures in Brazil’s 1998 executive elections to study the relationship between voting systems and viable and nonviable candidates’ vote shares, using regression discontinuity design. It finds that the introduction of electronic voting concentrated vote shares among viable candidates and thus exhibited electoral bias. We posit that this result occurred because viable candidates were better able to communicate the information that electronic voters needed to cast valid ballots than were their nonviable counterparts. The article uses survey data to demonstrate that electronic voters responded to changes in ballot design and internalized the information viable candidates made available to them.
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