Publication

This paper researches whether political participation affects policy outcomes. The authors estimate the effect of voter turnout on distributive policy outcomes using a large municipality-level data set from Japan. They argue that existing studies do not sufficiently cope with the omission of theoretically relevant variables from analysis and particularly politics before and after the voting day. By exploiting an instrumental variable based on their new data measuring the amount of rainfall on the voting day, they show that the turnout effect is significantly positive and that its magnitude is far larger than an estimate based on the ordinary least square regression.