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The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta
Chang-Tai Hsieh, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, Francisco Rodriguez
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Apr 2011, Vol. 3, No. 2: Pages 196-214

The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta

Chang-Tai Hsieh, 1

1The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL 60637.

Edward Miguel, 2

2Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Daniel Ortega, 3

3Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion, Avenida IESA, San Bernardino, Caracas, Venezuela.

Francisco Rodriguez4

4United Nations Development Program, One United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017.

Abstract

In 2004, the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters who had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chávez political opponent. We find that voters who were identified as Chávez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.3 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released. (JEL D72, O17)