TY - JOUR AU - Hastings,Justine S. AU - Kane,Thomas J. AU - Staiger,Douglas O. AU - Weinstein,Jeffrey M. TI - The Effect of Randomized School Admissions on Voter Participation JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11794 PY - 2005 Y2 - November 2005 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11794 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11794.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Justine S. Hastings Brown University Department of Economics 64 Waterman Street Providence, RI 02912 Tel: 203/432-3714 Fax: 203/432-6323 E-Mail: justine_hastings@brown.edu Thomas J. Kane Harvard Graduate School of Education Center for Education Policy Research 50 Church St., 4th Floor Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-4359 E-Mail: kaneto@gse.harvard.edu Douglas O. Staiger Dartmouth College Department of Economics HB6106, 301 Rockefeller Hall Hanover, NH 03755-3514 Tel: 603/646-2979 Fax: 603/646-2122 E-Mail: douglas.staiger@dartmouth.edu Jeffrey M. Weinstein Center for Policy Research Syracuse University 426 Eggers Hall Syracuse, NY 13244-1020 E-Mail: jmwein04@maxwell.syr.edu AB - There is little causal evidence on the effect of economic and policy outcomes on voting behavior. This paper uses randomized outcomes from a school choice lottery to examine if lottery outcomes affect voting behavior in a school board election. We show that losing the lottery has no significant impact on overall voting behavior; however, among white families, those with above median income and prior voting history, lottery losers were significantly more likely to vote than lottery winners. Using propensity score methods, we compare the voting of lottery participants to similar families who did not participate in the lottery. We find that losing the school choice lottery caused an increase in voter turnout among whites, while winning the lottery had no effect relative to non-participants. Overall, our empirical results lend support to models of expressive and retrospective voting, where likely voters are motivated to vote by past negative policy outcomes. ER -