There is Something in the Water: The Effects of a Bad Government on Voter Turnout

This thesis exploits the 2014–15 Flint Water Crisis as a quasi-natural experiment to examine how a severe public health and governance failure affects electoral participation. Leveraging precinct-level turnout data for gubernatorial and presidential elections in Genesee County (1998–2020), I employ an event-study difference-in differences design with fixed effects and controls for population and partisan composition. I find that, relative to neighboring precincts, voter turnout in Flint City declined by between 20 to 30% in the elections immediately following the crisis, a pattern that persists but loses statistical significance under “honest” bounds (Rambachan & Roth 2023) and synthetic DiD (Arkhangelsky et al. 2021) robustness checks. A parallel analysis of Republican vote share fails the pre-trend test, suggesting greater volatility in party support. These results highlight how a cute institutional failure can erode democratic engagement, even in voluntary voting systems. The findings contribute to the literature on political behavior by providing causal evidence that exogenous shocks to public trust and welfare can suppress turnout, with implications for debates on accountability and institutional resilience.