Abstract
This study builds and expands on on our earlier work on effects of elite behaviour on citizen political participation. In Kolstad and Wiig (2015) we use country-year panel data to test the effect of self-serving elite behaviour, proxied by portfolio investment in tax havens, on voter turnout. Using fixed effects estimation, we find that for well-functioning democracies there is a positive relation between the use of tax havens and voter turnout, suggesting that self-serving elite behaviour is associated with citizen political mobilization rather than voter apathy. While country fixed effects and further time-variant covariates are included to address endogeneity, it is difficult to fully allay such concerns using observational data. This pre-analysis plan therefore details an experimental study which will be performed to provide further evidence on the causal effect of self-serving elite behaviour on political participation. The experiment randomly assigns individuals to treatments (detailed below) where they are given information on elite behaviour and to a control group, in order to test the effect of giving such information on political behaviour, and to compare effects of giving information in different ways.