This study investigates how early childhood exposure to economic booms affects adult voting propensity, using the oil discovery in Rogaland as a natural experiment. It finds that children whose families benefited from this boom were approximately 4 percentage points more likely to vote when they reached adulthood compared to peers not exposed to such economic changes.
Exploiting the cohort-based design, the research isolates the effect of family income on voting behavior without conflating it with other parental characteristics. The difference-in-differences method reveals a significant increase in electoral engagement among these individuals.
Beyond financial factors alone, two additional mechanisms likely contributed to this finding: increased public spending by local governments and shifts in peer political behaviors within affected communities.
| The Effect of a Booming Local Economy in Early Childhood on the Propensity to Vote: Evidence from a Natural Experiment was authored by Henning Finseraas. It was published by Cambridge in BJPS in 2017. |
