SPARC this week (Thursday 11 February, 2.30-4pm) will host Susana Peralta, Associate Professor of Nova SBE University.

Her paper which you can find in attach is "Voter Turnout in Municipal Elections: Exploiting Differences in Council Size", and the abstract is below.

Abstract

Proportional representation (PR) systems are expected to attract more voters to the polls, as they increase the probability of a voter being decisive in the election. Using a panel of Portuguese local elections, between 2001 and 2017, we study how the number of representatives in Town Council affects turnout. We first compute a Local Voting Power Index and show that a higher ratio of Alderman per voter increases turnout. We then rely on the population-based rule that determines the size of Town Councils in Portugal to implement a Regression Discontinuity Design and compute a causal (local) effect of Council size on voter turnout. We find that, in line with instrumental theories of voting, an increase of two local representatives is associated with a boost of between 2% and 4% in the number of votes.

The new Zoom link: 

https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/86556119289?pwd=ZUJRRWp6dmxYVEFBVUxUUmRJZUpzUT09