Salience and Accountability: School Infrastructure and Last-Minute Electoral Punishment

Nicolas Ajzenman and Ruben Durante

No 14702, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Can seemingly unimportant factors influence voting decisions by making certain issues salient? We study this question in the context of Argentina's 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 provision, since information on public school infrastructure was readily available to parents before elections. An alternative interpretation is that direct exposure to poor school infrastructure at the time of voting makes public education - and the poor performance of the incumbent - more salient.

Keywords: Elections; Salience; School infrastructure; Education; Argentina (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14702 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Salience and Accountability: School Infrastructure and Last-Minute Electoral Punishment (2020)
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:cpr:ceprdp:14702

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14702

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().