Essays in political economics

Abstract

This dissertation examines the political economy of elections from three different angles in its three chapters. The first chapter studies voter turnout. I use discontinuities imposed by voting-age restrictions to identify the effect of past participation on subsequent participation decisions and partisan identification. I present three main findings. First, past presidential election participation increases the probability of subsequent participation. Second, participation in past presidential elections affects partisan identification. Third, these effects continue to persist for several election cycles after a voter first becomes eligible. The second chapter, which is joint work with Yuval Salant, studies voter choice. We explore how the ordering of candidates on ballots influences election outcomes. We present two main findings. First, there is both a politically and statistically significant increase in the probability of winning office from being listed first on the ballot. Second, we identify a new source of order-effects we term history-dependence. Specifically, we find that candidates perform better when listed immediately after lower quality candidates. This suggests that policy makers should use more sophisticated rotation schemes to mitigate order-effects in elections. The third chapter studies the strategic timing of elections by agenda-setters in direct democracy settings. Because concurrent elections affect turnout, scheduling referenda for different elections will produce different median voters. I hypothesize that agenda-setters with power over the timing of a referendum will schedule the referendum in conjunction with the other set of races that produce a policy closest to their preferred outcome. Consistent with the theory, I show that Wisconsin school boards' use of special elections for school referenda are related to differences in the revealed preferences of voters in low and high turnout elections.