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Caltech

Ulric B. and Evelyn L. Bray Social Sciences Seminar

Tuesday, October 11, 2022
4:00pm to 5:00pm
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Baxter Lecture Hall
Making policies matter: Voter responses to campaign promises
Cesi Cruz, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, UCLA; Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia,

Abstract: Can voters in clientelist countries be swayed by programmatic campaign promises? We combine a structural model and a large-scale field experiment disseminating candidate policy platforms in Philippine mayoral elections to show how voters respond to campaign promises. Voters who randomly received information about current campaign promises are more likely to vote for candidates closer to their own preferences; those also informed about past promises reward incumbents who fulfilled them. The structural model shows that information about campaign promises affects both the salience of policies and voter beliefs about candidate quality and policy platforms.

For more information, please contact Barbara Estrada by phone at 626-395-4083 or by email at [email protected].