Election-Campaign Law

New VTP working paper: ?Measuring the Effects of Voter Confidence on Political Participation: An Application to the 2006 Mexican Election?

By Michael Alvarez

Ines Levin and I recently posted a new working paper studying the causal effect of voter confidence on political participation, sing data from the 2006 Mexican Election, “Measuring the Effects of Voter Confidence on Political Participation: An Application to the 2006 Mexican Election.”

Here is the paper’s abstract:

In this paper we study the causal effect of voter confidence on participation decisions in the 2006 Mexican Election. Previous research has shown that voter confidence was a relevant factor in explaining participation during the years of the PRI hegemony. An open question is whether this relationship is still significant after the democratic transition taking place in the years 1997-2000. Moreover, in the previous literature, this problem was studied in a regression framework. In this article we argue that, since voter confidence and participation decisions are affected by similar covariates, a regression approach may lead to results which are too model dependent, and do not account for the heterogeneity of effects across voters. To solve this problem, we use matching methods, and find that voter confidence has considerable effects on participation decisions, but substantially different in magnitude from those found using the usual regression approach.

Full post as published by Election Updates on July 01, 2009 (boomark / email).