Browsing by Author "Cox, Loreto"

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    Fewer but Younger: Changes in Turnout After Voluntary Voting and Automatic Registration in Chile
    (2022) Cox, Loreto; Gonzalez, Ricardo
    Electoral rules are assumed to influence turnout. However, assessing this empirically is challenging because they rarely change and, when they do, counterfactuals are hard to come by. In 2012, Chile moved from voluntary and permanent registration and mandatory voting to automatic registration and voluntary voting. We study how electoral rules influence turnout by analyzing variations in turnout for presidential elections before and after this reform, with an original approach and using novel data. We estimate changes attributable to voluntary voting among the registered population as the increase in abstention rates among them and changes attributable to both automatic registration and voluntary voting among the non-registered population as the increase in turnout among them. We estimate counterfactual abstention and registration rates based on past behavior and use bounds to account for uncertainty. Our estimates suggest that while automatic registration and voluntary voting brought 7.1% of eligible population who were unregistered to the polls, voluntary voting pulled away 12% who were previously registered. The explicit purposes of this reform were to increase turnout and reduce the age bias in voting. We estimate a reduction in turnout of almost 5% of eligible population and a 39% reduction in the age bias of voters.
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    More Options, but Less Willing to Cast a Valid Vote: Evidence From Electoral Reform in Chile
    (2024) Cox, Loreto; Le Foulon, Carmen
    How do large-magnitude proportional systems affect invalid voting? We evaluate a Chilean electoral system reform that introduced proportionality. Voting is voluntary, and legislative and presidential elections are held concurrently. We compare the invalid votes between different types of elections before and after the reform using various difference-in-differences strategies. We find that invalid voting increased in legislative compared to presidential elections (pre-trends were parallel). The increase in invalid voting is greater in post-reform districts with higher magnitude and is not due to pre-reform district characteristics. The results of heterogeneity analyses and a survey experiment suggest the mechanism behind these findings is the cognitive burden associated with a longer ballot. This research highlights an understudied aspect of electoral systems: higher district magnitudes may be demobilizing in terms of valid voting for citizens who are more vulnerable to cognitive burden, even among those motivated enough to vote in the first-order election.
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    The 2019 Chilean Social Upheaval: A Descriptive Approach
    (2023) Cox, Loreto; González, Ricardo; Le Foulon, Carmen
    In 2019, student protests over an increase in subway fare in Chile escalated into violenceand a leaderless nationwide social upheaval. This research note takes a descriptiveapproach that goes beyond the protester/non-protesters dichotomy, because we believewe need a richer understanding of the“what, who, and how”of citizens around this out-break. Based on a surveyfielded amidst the upheaval, we distinguish protesters by inten-sity, and non-protesters by their position towards the upheaval. As expected, protesterstend to be young and educated. Strong protesters are more left-wing, interested in pol-itics, and more participative, including electorally. They endorse democracy but are crit-ical of its functioning, and more likely to justify illegal/violent actions as a means for socialchange. Inequality appears as a cross-cutting concern, even among opponents, butstrong protesters are more distrustful of its sources and of the rich themselves. We con-clude by discussing the implications of thesefindings