{"id":9429,"date":"2020-07-03T09:00:16","date_gmt":"2020-07-03T07:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/?p=9429"},"modified":"2021-07-01T14:42:38","modified_gmt":"2021-07-01T12:42:38","slug":"how-voters-respond-to-crime-control-policies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/how-voters-respond-to-crime-control-policies\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"How Voters Respond to Crime Control Policies"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Roberto Galbiati, Department of economics*<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a9 MikeDotta, Shutterstock<\/p><\/div>\n

Many democratically elected governments around the world are probably wondering how voters will respond to the policies they implemented to face the COVID-19 crise. Some will expect voters\u2019 support to go up on ideological basis, others will anticipate a response driven by the immediately observable consequences of the policies. Health policies are not unique, the researcher that wants to predict their consequences faces the same obstacles of predicting the electoral impact of other kind of policies: we do not observe empirical counterfactuals. <\/span><\/p>\n

In order to properly understand how and whether voters respond to government’s policies, the ideal experiment would require the government to randomly manipulate the content of a policy and then this random manipulation mapping into different outcomes. For example, to properly assess the voters\u2019 response to a tax increase or cut by the central government, it would be necessary to observe a random variation of its effects across lower levels of government, for instance municipalities. Or, given an emergency health policy, it would be necessary to observe locally random variation in its intensity. Such a local random variation would allow to identify the causal effect of the policy outcome on voters\u2019 electoral behavior conditioning on the ideological preferences of voters on these types of policies. In other words, causal responses of voters to policies can be correctly assessed only if we observe variations in the effects of the policy that are independent both from the voters\u2019 and the government’s characteristics.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Criminal Justice: an Important Influence on Voter Behaviour?<\/h4>\n
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\u00a9 Fresnel, Shutterstock<\/p><\/div>\n

In a recent paper Drago, Galbiati and Sobbrio<\/span>(1)<\/sup><\/a>Drago, F., Galbiati, R. and Sobbrio F. – \u00ab The Political Cost of Being Soft on Crime: Evidence from a Natural Experiment<\/a> \u00bb, Journal of the European Economic Association, 2019.<\/span><\/span>