Candidates’ Education and Turnout: Evidence from Italyn Municipal Elections
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Marco Alberto De Benedetto
Abstract
We analyze the impact that the educational level of candidates running for the position of mayor has on electoral turnout by using a large dataset for Italyn municipal elections held between 1993 and 2011. We firstly estimate a municipality fixed effects model and show that the median education of candidates standing in an election is positively correlated with turnout. To handle endogeneity issues arising from the unobservable time variant features of electoral races, we build on the literature which shows that politicians’ educational level is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design on the basis of the fact that the wages of mayors in Italy increase non-monotonically at different thresholds. Results show that an exogenous increase in the median educational level of candidates, induced by a higher wage, leads to an increase in turnout of about 1 percentage point.
© 2019 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- When a Door Closes, a Window Opens? Long-Term Labor Market Effects of Involuntary Separations
- Candidates’ Education and Turnout: Evidence from Italyn Municipal Elections
- von Thünen: Capital, Production Functions, Marginal Productivity Wages, and the Natural Wage
- On the Incentive Effects of Sample Size in Monitoring Agents – A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis
- On Estimating the Size of the Shadow Economy
- Reply to Gebhard Kirchgässner
Articles in the same Issue
- When a Door Closes, a Window Opens? Long-Term Labor Market Effects of Involuntary Separations
- Candidates’ Education and Turnout: Evidence from Italyn Municipal Elections
- von Thünen: Capital, Production Functions, Marginal Productivity Wages, and the Natural Wage
- On the Incentive Effects of Sample Size in Monitoring Agents – A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis
- On Estimating the Size of the Shadow Economy
- Reply to Gebhard Kirchgässner
