Does Context Outweigh Individual Characteristics in Driving Voting Behavior? Evidence from Relocations within the U.S.

For suggestions that have improved this article, we are grateful to Tiziano Arduini, Giulia Brancaccio, Rafael Di Tella, Amy Finkelstein, Jeffry Frieden, Matthew Gentzkow, Ethan Kaplan, Brian Knight, Sendhil Mullainathan, Benjamin Olken, Anthony Orlando, Jesse Shapiro, Andrei Shleifer, Erik Snowberg, James Snyder, and Matthew Weinzierl, as well as seminar participants at Harvard, Bocconi, EIEF, EUI, LMU, the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, the University of Bologna, the Catholic University of Milan, Uppsala University, the University of Navarra, Queen’s University Belfast, and conference participants at the Political Economy meeting at the NBER Summer Institute, the IEB Workshop on Political Economy, Political Institutions and Political Economy at the University of Southern California, the Erasmus University Workshop on Political Economy, and the 2019 Marco Fanno Alumni Meeting in Naples. We are heavily indebted to Peter Hull for guiding us through the use of his mover average treatment effect (MATE) estimator and for sharing a dofile implementing this estimator. We thank Catalist for providing the U.S. individual-level panel data and responding to our queries about them, as well as Paul DiBello and Robert Freeman for invaluable help managing the data acquisition and setting up the data work. We gratefully acknowledge generous funding from the Eric M. Mindich Research Fund on the Foundations of Human Behavior. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• October 20, 2020
• June 22, 2021