Damien BOL, Assistant Professor of Political Behavior,  The Effect of Being a Poll Worker on Democratic Attitudes in a Post-Conflict Society: Evidence from an Experiment in Colombia (Intervention en anglais)

Abstract: In an era marked by democratic backsliding, maintaining high levels of support for democracy among the population is crucial. A promising policy to achieve this goal is the direct involvement of citizens in the electoral process as poll workers. It is expected that their confidence in and support for elections and democratic procedures will increase through hands-on experience in the electoral process. In this paper, we test this hypothesis by leveraging a pre-registered, large-scale experiment conducted in collaboration with the Colombian government during the 2023 regional elections. As a democratic yet post-conflict society, Colombia represents a critical case study in this context. In this experiment, educated adults were randomly selected to serve as poll workers. Our findings, derived from a post-election survey with approximately 30,000 respondents—where poll workers were overrepresented to ensure statistical robustness—indicate that being selected as a poll worker and undergoing the relevant training causally enhances confidence in electoral procedures, but less so in municipalities heavily affected by political violence during the civil conflict between the government and guerrilla forces. Furthermore, our results also indicate the existence of a backlash effect of poll working that decrease trust in the way votes are counted. This paper thus offers cautious support for the use of poll working as a strategy to counteract democratic backsliding.

Discutante : Lou Safra (sous réserve)

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