Policy Termination and Retrospective Voting: Public Childcare Services in Mexico

• In Event: Democracy and Administration: Accountability, Representation, Capacity and Power

Abstract

Citizens' capacity to hold government officials accountable is crucial for a democracy. Theories of political accountability argue that the capacity of citizens to punish and reward policymakers based on performance electorally is vital for democratic well-being (Grant and Keohane 2005). This paper examines the effect of eliminating a federal childcare program on retrospective voting. Previous literature has shown that public programs might result in electoral gains for incumbent parties (De la O 2013). However, the study of the electoral costs of policy termination has received scant attention. Recent literature shows that losing access to public programs hurts some welfare outcomes (DeLeire 2019; Tarazi et al. 2017; Tello-Trillo 2021). Based on these findings, we hypothesize that reducing access to childcare through eliminating a widely used federal childcare program will harm the presidential incumbent party electoral support. To analyze this hypothesis, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation provided by the termination, in 2019, of the Childcare Program to Support Working Mothers (PEI for its name in Spanish), implemented in Mexico for 12 years. Using this variation, we estimate a difference-in-differences model where we compare the electoral outcomes of the 2021 Mexican federal elections in municipalities with a more eligible population against municipalities with a fewer eligible population, before and after the termination of the program. Our outcome variables are voter turnout and the candidates' vote share from the president's party. This paper adds to the literature on the political costs of program termination (Kogan 2020) and to the theory of retrospective voting (Dynes and Holbein 2020).

Authors

• Guillermo M. Cejudo-Ramirez, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

• Johabed Georgina Olvera Esquivel, Indiana University