IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_12075.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Should I Mail or Should I Go: Voting Behavior After a One-Time All-Postal Election

Author

Listed:
  • Marius Kröper
  • Valentin Lindlacher

Abstract

We investigate how reducing information costs through forced experimentation with postal voting, while holding administrative rules fixed, affects subsequent voting behavior. Leveraging a natural experiment during Bavaria’s 2020 Mayoral Elections and drawing on municipality-level administrative data spanning seven federal and state elections (2013-2025), we employ an event study design. We find a transitory increase in total turnout of 0.4 percentage points in the first election after the treatment, one and a half years later, and a persistent substitution from in-person to postal voting even five years after the treatment. Municipalities with a higher turnout in the past show larger effects. Investigating the distribution of information costs shows an age gradient, with the highest information costs in the oldest municipalities. The conservative governing party gains from higher postal turnout and other right-wing parties’ in-person voters.

Suggested Citation

  • Marius Kröper & Valentin Lindlacher, 2025. "Should I Mail or Should I Go: Voting Behavior After a One-Time All-Postal Election," CESifo Working Paper Series 12075, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12075
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12075.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H70 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - General
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12075. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.