Salience and accountability: School infrastructure and last-minute electoral punishment

Nicolás Ajzenman and Ruben Durante
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Nicolás Ajzenman: Sao Paulo School of Economics - FGV
Ruben Durante: Universitat Pompeu Fabra

No 63, Working Papers from Red Nacional de Investigadores en Economía (RedNIE)

Abstract: Can seemingly unimportant factors influence voting decisions by making certain issues salient? We study this question in the context of Argentina 2015 presidential elections by examining how the quality of the infrastructure of the school where citizens were assigned to vote influenced their voting choice. Exploiting the quasi-random assignment of voters to ballot stations located in different public schools in the city of Buenos Aires, we find that individuals assigned to schools with poorer infrastructure were significantly less likely to vote for Mauricio Macri, the incumbent mayor then running for president. The effect is larger in low-income areas - where fewer people can afford private substitutes to public education - and in places where more households have children in school age. The effect is unlikely to be driven by information scarcity, since information on public school infrastructure was readily available to parents before elections. Rather, direct exposure to poor school infrastructure at the time of voting is likely to make public education - and the poor performance of the incumbent - more salient.

Keywords: Elections; Salience; Electoral; Punishment; Public; Infrastructure; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 D90 I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aoz:wpaper:63

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