2.13. The voter registration decision under a compulsory voting system: Evidence from Chilean youth vote

Autores: A.Acuña

ABSTRACT
Around the world, youth vote rate exhibits a remarkable decline over the last two decades considering both developed and developing countries. On this basis, this paper proposes a microeconomic model for the voter registration decision, which enables to derive an empirical expression that can be estimated and tested. The resulting empirical model is consistent with the one proposed by Silberman & Durden (1975). The model is estimated according to the corner solution approach using a panel for the Chilean democracy, which includes its 346 municipalities for the period 2000-2009.

The results indicate that the main determinants of youth vote registration are real wage, citizen participation and poverty rates and they also give fully support to the ”opportunity-cost of time” argument. Moreover, the estimated marginal effect are lower in women than men, which suggests that female population is potentially more sensitive to variables that are not included in the model. Finally, the evidence shows that the realization of a ballot might increases the Chilean youth vote in about five hundred thousand people.
Keywords: citizen participation, compulsory voting, corner solution model, voting behavior.