The Effect of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Voting Participation: Evidence from the Finnish Basic Income Experiment.

Hirvonen, Salomo; Schafer, Jerome; Tukiainen, Janne

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4279717

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The findings also contrast with studies that document a positive correlation between unearned income and participation (e.g. Hirvonen et al 2022), suggesting that asset wealth and other types of windfall gains should be distinctly considered in empirical research.…”

Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…From this perspective, political participation can be seen as both a gratifying endeavor and a consumption good that imparts inherent satisfaction to individuals (Brady 2004). Some studies suggest that this is indeed the case, showing that political participation tends to increase with unearned income generated by government programs (Hirvonen et al 2022). Still, other studies offer a more critical view, finding no such effects (Akee et al 2020).…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The twin dimension of the dataset allows us to cancel out time-invariant heterogeneity such as early life socialization and genetically heritable traits while keeping the external validity relatively high, given that we study common forms of asset wealth. This can be contrasted with research that utilizes so called unearned income gains from lottery winnings or political interventions as exogenous economic shocks in the role of independent variables rather than asset wealth (Akee et al 2020;Brännlund et al n.d.;Hirvonen et al 2022). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to use this kind of wealth data for this purpose.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Do the rich ditch traditional politics? Evidence from Sweden

Brännlund,

Ahlskog

2023

Preprint

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The world has seen a massive increase in wealth and wealth inequality over the last decades. Given the skew in policy making towards the preferences of the wealthy, this raises the question of how individual wealth affects political participation. Approaching this question empirically is complicated by the fact that random variation in wealth is rare, and many factors that can bias the estimation of the relationship between wealth and participation are difficult to measure. We address the question using a Swedish discordant identical twin design with a) register-based wealth data, b) validated election turnout for multiple elections, and c) self-reported civic participation measures. This design allows us to rule out all shared confounders, such as genetics, family background and socialization, and shared networks. We find that even though wealthy individuals descriptively vote more often, the causal effect of wealth is probably zero, and may for civic participation even be negative.

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Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Do the rich ditch traditional politics? Evidence from Sweden

Brännlund,

Ahlskog

2023

Preprint

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Policy feedback and voter turnout: Evidence from the Finnish basic income experiment

Hirvonen,

Schafer,

Tukiainen

2024

American J Political Sci

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In many democracies, unemployed and low‐income citizens are less willing to vote. Can social policies weaken the link between income and turnout? We study policy feedback leveraging a unique experiment in Finland, which randomly assigned a sizable group of unemployed to receiving an unconditional basic income (BI) for 2 years (2017–19). Combining individual‐level registry and survey data, we show that the intervention has large positive effects on voter turnout. Unconditional BI increases turnout in municipal elections by about 3 percentage points (p.p.), on average, an effect that is concentrated among marginal voters (+ 6–8 p.p.) and persists in national elections after the end of the experiment. Exploring possible mechanisms, our analysis highlights the role of the interpretive effects that follow from unconditionality in the bureaucratic process, including higher levels of political trust and efficacy. We discuss implications for theories of voter turnout and policy feedback, and the design of BI policies.

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The Effect of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Voting Participation: Evidence from the Finnish Basic Income Experiment.

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Do the rich ditch traditional politics? Evidence from Sweden

Do the rich ditch traditional politics? Evidence from Sweden

Policy feedback and voter turnout: Evidence from the Finnish basic income experiment

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