Turnout and social capital: evidence from rainy election days in Italy

We use data on Italian municipal elections from 1993 to 2009 to provide evidence on the role of social capital in explaining civic engagement measured through electoral turnout. We first show that an exogenous increase in the cost of voting—due to rainfall on election day—has a negative and significant impact on voters' participation. However, we also find that a sufficiently high level of social capital—that we proxy with the percentage of blood donations at provincial level—is enough to attenuate the cost of voting induced by adverse weather conditions. We interpret this as evidence that non-instrumental factors, like individual sense of civic duty and intrinsic motivations, play a non-negligible role in explaining electoral turnout.