Information and voting: Evidence from Peru's 2026 presidential election

Marcelo Gallardo, Nicolas Velarde and Cristina Gutarra

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study how election-night flash estimates shape voting in Peru's fragmented 2026 presidential election. We exploit a natural experiment: on April 12, 2026, 187 polling tables across 13 voting centers failed to install, and the \emph{Jurado Nacional de Elecciones} (JNE) extended voting for the affected $\approx\!55 000$ electors to Monday, April 13. These voters cast ballots after observing the Ipsos and Datum flash estimates; otherwise comparable Sunday voters did not. A Bayesian-updating model of multi-candidate plurality voting frames the analysis, yielding predictions about vote reallocation toward the three candidates the estimates rendered viable -- L\'opez Aliaga, S\'anchez, and Nieto. We estimate treatment effects on candidate vote shares at both the \emph{acta} level and the acta-weighted polling-station level, comparing treated and control \emph{locales de votaci\'on} matched on pre-treatment covariates. How flash estimates reshape voting is of first-order importance for Peru, given its institutional instability and high political volatility over the past decade.

Date: 2026-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-inv and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.01687 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2606.01687

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().