Invalid Voting and Educational Inequality in Chile
(2018) NEKH01 20172Department of Economics
- Abstract
- Despite being one of Latin Americas most progressed countries and a recent member of the OECD, Chile has issues of high inequality that is apparent not least in its educational system. This paper seeks to investigate what impact educational disparities have on voting behaviour, in the context of a policy reform introduced in 2010 that shifted the voting system from mandatory to voluntary. Data on voting outcome and educational level is collected for 343 municipalities, and a dummy variable regression with additional control variables is run. As dependent variable, the percentage of invalid votes from presidential elections of 2009 and 2013 is used. The paper finds a negative correlation between level of education and invalid votes of the... (More)
- Despite being one of Latin Americas most progressed countries and a recent member of the OECD, Chile has issues of high inequality that is apparent not least in its educational system. This paper seeks to investigate what impact educational disparities have on voting behaviour, in the context of a policy reform introduced in 2010 that shifted the voting system from mandatory to voluntary. Data on voting outcome and educational level is collected for 343 municipalities, and a dummy variable regression with additional control variables is run. As dependent variable, the percentage of invalid votes from presidential elections of 2009 and 2013 is used. The paper finds a negative correlation between level of education and invalid votes of the municipalities. Furthermore, findings suggest that higher educated municipalities reduced their share of invalid votes more than the less educated between the two elections. Since the regression is likely to suffer from endogeneity problems, no causal interpretations can be made. Nonetheless, results seem to indicate that education is linked to voting, and that this in turn might be affected by the electoral policy shift. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/8935474
- author
- Hochhalter, Lina LU
- supervisor
- organization
- alternative title
- A study of an electoral policy reform
- course
- NEKH01 20172
- year
- 2018
- type
- M2 - Bachelor Degree
- subject
- keywords
- Voting behaviour, Education, Policy reform, Chile
- language
- English
- id
- 8935474
- date added to LUP
- 2018-02-14 18:23:36
- date last changed
- 2018-02-14 18:23:36
@misc{8935474, abstract = {{Despite being one of Latin Americas most progressed countries and a recent member of the OECD, Chile has issues of high inequality that is apparent not least in its educational system. This paper seeks to investigate what impact educational disparities have on voting behaviour, in the context of a policy reform introduced in 2010 that shifted the voting system from mandatory to voluntary. Data on voting outcome and educational level is collected for 343 municipalities, and a dummy variable regression with additional control variables is run. As dependent variable, the percentage of invalid votes from presidential elections of 2009 and 2013 is used. The paper finds a negative correlation between level of education and invalid votes of the municipalities. Furthermore, findings suggest that higher educated municipalities reduced their share of invalid votes more than the less educated between the two elections. Since the regression is likely to suffer from endogeneity problems, no causal interpretations can be made. Nonetheless, results seem to indicate that education is linked to voting, and that this in turn might be affected by the electoral policy shift.}}, author = {{Hochhalter, Lina}}, language = {{eng}}, note = {{Student Paper}}, title = {{Invalid Voting and Educational Inequality in Chile}}, year = {{2018}}, }