Movatterモバイル変換


[0]ホーム

URL:


Skip to main content

Voting for Democracy: Chile's Plebiscito and the Electoral Participation of a Generation

Ethan Kaplan,Fernando Saltiel &Sergio S. Urzúa
Working Paper 26440
DOI 10.3386/w26440
Issue Date

This paper assesses if voting for democracy affects long-term electoral participation. We study the effects of participating in Chile's 1988 plebiscite, which determined whether democracy would be reinstated after a 15-year long military dictatorship. Taking advantage of individual-level voting data for upwards of 13 million Chileans, we implement an age-based RD design comparing long run registration and turnout rates across marginally eligible and ineligible individuals. We find that Plebiscite eligibility (participation) significantly increased electoral turnout three decades later, reaching 1.8 (3.3) percentage points in the 2017 Presidential election. These effects are robust to different specifications and distinctive to the 1988 referendum. We discuss potential mechanisms concluding that the scale of initial mobilization explains the estimated effects. We find that plebiscite eligibility induced a sizable share of less educated voters to register to vote compared to eligibles in other upstream elections. Since less educated voters tended to support Chile's governing left-wing coalition, we argue that the plebiscite contributed to the emergence of one party rule the twenty years following democratization.

  • We thank seminar participants at the Inter-American Development Bank, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), Universidad de los Andes (Chile), ITAM and Bocconi University for helpful comments and suggestions. We thank Felipe Gonzalez for providing television penetration data from 1987. We thank Jose Cabezas and Mateo-Uribe Castro for helpful comments as well as Ming Fang for excellent research assistance. We thank the Electoral Commission (SERVEL) and Ministry of Finance of Chile for providing access to de-identified administrative data for research purposes. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.


  • Ethan Kaplan, Fernando Saltiel, and Sergio S. Urzúa, "Voting for Democracy: Chile's Plebiscito and the Electoral Participation of a Generation," NBER Working Paper 26440 (2019), https://doi.org/10.3386/w26440.

Published Versions

Ethan Kaplan & Fernando Saltiel & Sergio Urzúa, 2023. "Voting for Democracy: Chile’s Plebiscito and the Electoral Participation of a Generation," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, vol 15(3), pages 438-464.

Related

More from the NBER

In addition toworking papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — theNBER Reporter, theNBER Digest, theBulletin on Health, and theBulletin on Entrepreneurship — as well as onlineconference reports,video lectures, andinterviews.

 2025, 17th Annual Feldstein Lecture, N. Gregory Mankiw," The Fiscal Future"
  • Feldstein Lecture
N. Gregory Mankiw, Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University, presented the 2025 Martin Feldstein...
 2025 Methods Lecture, Raj Chetty, "Uncovering Causal Mechanisms: Mediation Analysis and Surrogate Indices"
  • Methods Lectures
SlidesBackground materials on mediationImai, Kosuke, Dustin Tingley, and Teppei Yamamoto. (2013). “Experimental Designs...
2025 International Trade and Macroeconomics, "Panel on The Future of the Global Economy"
  • Panel Discussion
Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant #G-2023-19633, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation grant #20251294...

[8]ページ先頭

©2009-2025 Movatter.jp