Salience and Accountability: School Infrastructure and Last-Minute Electoral Punishment

Abstract

Can seemingly unimportant factors influence voting decisions by making certain issues salient?We study this question in the context of Argentina 2015 presidential elections by examining how the quality of the infrastructure of the school where citizens were assigned to vote influenced their voting choice. Exploiting the quasi-random assignment of voters to ballot stations located in different public schools in the city of Buenos Aires, we find that individuals assigned to schools with poorer infrastructure were significantly less likely to vote for Mauricio Macri, the incumbent mayor then running for president. The effect is larger in low-income areas -where fewer people can afford private substitutes to public education -and in places where more households have children in school age. The effect is unlikely to be driven by information scarcity, since information on public school infrastructure was readily available to parents before elections. Rather, direct exposure to poor school infrastructure at the time of voting is likely to make public education -and the poor performance of the incumbentmore salient.JEL Classification: D72, D83, I25, D90. seminar participants at the LACEA-LAMES 2019's annual meeting and the first LACEA-Brain meeting for helpful comments.

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“…First, a number of papers emphasize the power of salience in capturing individuals' attention (Taylor andThompson 1982, Kahneman 2003). Even when the necessary information is readily available, making a particular feature of the latter more or less apparent has been shown to drastically affect choices in different settings, particularly in the presence of limited attention or cognitive overload (see for instance Chetty et al 2009, DellaVigna and Pollet 2009, Ajzenman and Durante 2020. Although the external rewards scheme was present in every condition, this arm aimed to make it prominent at a targeted moment.…”