Abstract
We investigate whether the degree of political competition affects electoral turnout by using Italian municipal election data from 1993 to 2011. Relying on elections held using a double ballot system, we apply an instrumental variable technique exploiting the actual closeness between the two leading candidates in the first round as an instrument for closeness in the second round. The use of this strategy to estimate the impact of closeness on turnout is new to the literature. Controlling for municipal fixed effects and candidates’ characteristics, we find that expected closeness significantly increases turnout, thus supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in tighter political races. The estimated effect is much larger than that found when measuring closeness with ex-post electoral results, suggesting quite a relevant endogeneity bias in previous studies.
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Notes
A similar figure has been recorded for recent parliamentary elections (78 %).
See the webpage http://elezionistorico.interno.it/ (Archivio Storico delle Elezioni).
During this period, the Mayor was elected directly in the first round in 1,057 elections, so no second round of voting took place.
We also experimented by defining Electoral Margin as the absolute difference between the number of votes for the two leading candidates at the first round divided by the sum of votes they obtained |v 1−v 2|/(v 1+v 2). Results (not reported) are very similar to those shown in the paper.
Our dependent variable Valid (Second Round) is slightly different from other measures of turnout used in the literature since we exclude blank and invalid ballots whereas these are typically included in the turnout variable.
In the second round, 0.83 % of ballots are blank, while 1.54 % are invalid.
It takes 13 years to attain a High-School Diploma while 17–18 years are necessary to attain a University Degree.
We also have run separate regressions for southern and northern municipalities to investigate whether the relationship between closeness and turnout is different in the two geographical areas, but we do not find any significant difference.
Following a common practice, we subtract the mean value of Valid (First Round) to interpret the coefficients of regressions more easily. By subtracting its mean value from Valid (First Round) when entering an interaction term, we can interpret the coefficient of Electoral Margin as its impact on Turnout when Valid First Round is equal to its mean value.
Very similar results are obtained when we include the percentage of votes won by the two leading candidates in the first round and turnout in the first round among the controls.
Since the second ballot is held only if none of the candidates obtains an absolute majority of votes in the first ballot, the sample we have used in previous estimates is a non-randomly selected sample. We have estimated a two-step Heckman selection model to correct for the fact that municipalities holding a second round are a non-randomly selected sample. Using the Number of Candidates in the first round as an independent variable included in the selection equation, but arguably not relevant for the outcome equation (only the two candidates obtaining the most votes compete in the second round), we find results that are in line with the OLS estimates reported in Table 2.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Stefano Trulli of the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs for making some data available and for helping us with their use. We thank three anonymous referees, the Editor in chief William F. Shughart II, Guglielmo Barone, Giorgio Bellettini, Marco Debenedetto, Stefano Gagliarducci, Vincenzo Galasso, Laura Mazzuca, Paolo Pinotti, Gerard Roland and seminar participants to the 1st Workshop on Economics and Politics (Bologna, October 2011) for useful comments and suggestions.
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De Paola, M., Scoppa, V. The impact of closeness on electoral participation exploiting the Italian double ballot system. Public Choice 160, 467–479 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0105-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0105-7
Keywords
- Electoral turnout
- Closeness
- Electoral competition. Instrumental variables estimates
- Double ballot system