The Effect of Randomized School Admissions on Voter Participation.

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.