Blind Retrospection and the Spanish Christmas Lottery: An Updated Assessment

• In Event: Evaluations of Politicians and Voting Behavior

Abstract

The Spanish Christmas Lottery has attracted attention from scholars studying public opinion and elections because it represents a pure case of what Achen and Bartels (2016) call “blind retrospection.” More than 75% of Spanish households participate in the lottery, and roughly 0.1% of the Spanish GDP changes hands every December. Because Spaniards tend to buy tickets in geographically clustered groups, the prizes amount to a large economic windfall for winning localities. Bagues and Esteve-Volart (2016) demonstrate that popularity of the incumbent party surges in winning provinces during the quarter after the prize is announced; they also use electoral data to show that winning provinces are more likely to cast votes for the incumbent party. We revisit their analysis, updating their 1986-2010 dataset to include results through 2023. In addition, we assemble data from the Catalan lottery, which also attracts very large numbers of participants, for the period 2016-2023. Our study represents the first out-of-sample replication of Bagues and Esteve-Volart’s (2016) finding that lottery windfalls elevate the popularity of the governing party, a thesis with profound implications for the large literatures on economic voting and retrospective voting.

Authors

• Carolina Bernal, Columbia University

• Donald P. Green, Columbia University

• David Vilalta