Political Economy Workshop (Gov 3007)

Date: 

Monday, November 23, 2015, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel K354
Yusuf Neggers will present his job market paper "Enfranchising Your Own? Experimental Evidence on Polling Officer Identity and Electoral Outcomes in India” Abstract for "Enfranchising Your Own? Experimental Evidence on Polling Officer Identity and Electoral Outcomes in India” The spread of democracy in the developing world has been accompanied by concerns regarding the integrity of election management. This paper estimates the effects of ethnic diversity, or lack thereof, among polling station officials on voting outcomes. I exploit a natural experiment in the 2014 parliamentary elections in India, where the government mandated the random assignment of state employees to the teams that managed polling stations on election day. I find that the presence of officers of minority religious or caste identity within teams led to an average shift in vote share margin of 2.3 percentage points toward the political parties traditionally associated with these groups. Significant spillover effects also occurred across polling stations, and the magnitude of the combined direct and indirect effects is large enough to be relevant to election outcomes. Using survey experiments conducted with more than 5,000 registered voters and election officials, I provide evidence of own-group favoritism in polling personnel and identify the process of voter identity verification as an important channel through which voting outcomes are impacted.