Civic Duty and Voting under Authoritarianism: A Randomized Experiment in Vietnam

• In Event: Perspectives on Authoritarian Durability and Survival

Abstract

The literature on authoritarian elections has provided several persuasive theories for why authoritarian regimes hold flawed elections. However, it has been less successful at demonstrating why citizens participate in them. While economic motivations or extrinsic payoff (e.g., clientelism, social sanctions, and state performance) are documented as reasons for voting in autocratic elections, scholars have paid less attention to how non-instrumental motivations that are based on intrinsic values (e.g., civic duty or expressive voting) influence voter behaviors. We advance the budding efforts to probe non-economic drivers of voting in autocratic regimes using a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) experiment during the 2021 Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA) election in Ho Chi Minh City. Building on the country’s effort to engage youth voters, we sent three different forms of government-approved voter information packets to college students. These included the primary treatment of a civic duty package explaining the VNA's role and citizens' electoral responsibilities. We compared its effects against a more standard candidate quality treatment with biographical information and a policy objective treatment with the forthcoming legislative docket. We find that none of the treatments had a positive impact on turnout or vote choice relative to a control group that received no electoral information at all. While the civic duty treatment did not influence voting, it did lead to significant and substantively meaningful increases in interest in the VNA. This is consistent with findings from the growing literature on civic duty to vote under autocracies that civic duty is not just a democratic sentiment; it can and does exist even under autocratic regimes.

Authors

• Trung-Anh Nguyen, Duke University

• Edmund J. Malesky, Duke University