Democracy, Government Responsiveness, and Electoral Accountability : Figure 1: V

Question

Democracy, Government Responsiveness, and Electoral Accountability :

Figure 1: Valid Votes/Turnout - Local Averages and Parametric Fit 642 0 20000 40000 60000 80000 100000 Number of Registered Voters- 1996 Valid Votes/Tumout - 1994 Election (Paper Only) Valid Votes/Tunout 1998 Election (Discontinuity) Valid Votes/Tumout-2002 Election (Electronic Only) Each marker represents the average value of the variable in a 4,000-voter bin. The continuous lines are from a from a quadratic fit over the original ("unbinned") data. The vertical line marks the 40,500-voter threshold.

Explanation / Answer

In the mid-1990s, the Brazilian government developed an EV technology
as a substitute for paper ballots. While its introduction aimed at reducing the
time and costs of vote counting, other features of the technology, such as the
use of candidates’ photographs as visual aids, the use of error messages for
voters about to cast residual votes, and guiding the voting process step by step,
facilitated voting and reduced errors.
Four sets of additional tests provide evidence against these possible confounding
effects. First, the timing of effects occurs quickly after elections, implying
that possible omitted shocks (and their mean reversion) must follow
quite specific timing. Second, the share of voters above the cutoff is orthogonal
to changes in outcomes in periods when it is not associated with changes in
voting technology, addressing the issue of preexisting trends. Third, I find negligible
(placebo) effects on variables not expected to be affected by EV, such as
general economic conditions and birth outcomes for more educated mothers,
as well as spending by municipal governments, which were exposed to EV under
different timing but should also respond to shocks to health care demand.
Fourth, the results are robust to controlling for (nonlinear) time trends interacted
with state characteristics, as well as an instrumental variable strategy that
focuses on the distribution of municipalities closer to the cutoff.
The estimates indicate that the de facto enfranchisement of approximately a
tenth of Brazilian voters increased the share of states’ budgets spent on health
care by 3.4 percentage points (p.p.), raising expenditure by 34% in an eightyear
period. It also boosted the proportion of uneducated mothers with more
than seven prenatal visits by 7 p.p. and lowered the prevalence of low-weight
births by 0.5 p.p. (respectively, a 19% and 68% change over sample averages).

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