Rodrigo Schneider (Skidmore College and EPRG) has published the paper: “Winners and Losers of the Ballot: Electronic vs. Traditional Paper Voting Systems in Brazil” in Latin American Politics and Society.
The paper shows that the introduction of electronic voting in Brazil let to a concentration of voter shares among viable candidates, away from nonviable ones.
Please check the entire paper here. The access is free for a short period. Please find the abstract below:
Scholars concur that free and fair elections are essential for proper democratic functioning, but our understanding of the political effects of democratic voting systems is incomplete. This article mitigates the gap by exploiting the gradual transformation of voting systems and ballot structures in Brazil’s 1998 executive elections to study the relationship between voting systems and viable and nonviable candidates’ vote shares, using regression discontinuity design. It finds that the introduction of electronic voting concentrated vote shares among viable candidates and thus exhibited electoral bias. We posit that this result occurred because viable candidates were better able to communicate the information that electronic voters needed to cast valid ballots than were their nonviable counterparts. The article uses survey data to demonstrate that electronic voters responded to changes in ballot design and internalized the information viable candidates made available to them.
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About Mauricio Bugarin
Mauricio Soares Bugarin is full professor at the Economics Department of the University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and is currently Leader of the Economics and Politics Research Group (CNPq-UnB). From 2006 to 2011 he was full professor of Economics at Insper Institute, São Paulo, Brazil, where he served as the director of undergraduate studies in Economics and created the joint degree program in Economics and Business Administration.
Prof. Bugarin is a research fellow of the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) and served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Latin American Chapter of the Econometric Society from 2007 to 2011. He has produced numerous research articles published in peer reviewed journals, including the Journal of Mathematical Economics, Oxford Academic Papers, Public Choice, and Social Choice and Welfare; a book on the control of public expenditure in Brazil published by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation; several academic book chapters; and has received several academic prizes including Brazilian National Treasure Secretariat Prizes (Public Finance), a National Health Economics Prize, and the Haralambos Simeonides Prize for the best article in Economics published in a year by a Brazilian author.
Prof. Bugarin’s main interests include public economics, public finance and the relationship between economics and politics. He regularly teaches PhD courses in game theory and mechanism design, the economics of incentives and information and positive political economics.
Economics and Politics Research Group 