Underlying reasons for certain voting outcomes are subject to a vivid debate – especially in times of landslide changes in voting outcomes of long-established parties in many European countries including Germany. The linkages between these voting outcomes and economic indicators are rather elusive since many confounding and unobservable aspects determine voting decisions. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment resulting from a legislation change in the German state of Bavaria that effectively increased family benefits for unemployment benefit recipients in certain districts, we try to identify the effect of this legislation on voting outcomes in the Bavarian state election of 2018. While we do not find a significant effect on general election outcomes in the affected districts, our results imply that the general debate seems to have affected the voting behavior of families with unemployment benefits and children under the age of three.

某些投票结果的根本原因尚需进行激烈辩论，尤其是在包括德国在内的许多欧洲国家中，老派政党的投票结果发生滑坡变化时，尤其如此。这些投票结果与经济指标之间的联系非常难以捉摸，因为许多令人困惑且不可观察的方面决定了投票决定。利用德国巴伐利亚州立法变化导致的准自然实验，该变化有效地增加了某些地区的失业救济金领取者的家庭福利，我们试图确定该立法对2018年巴伐利亚州选举的投票结果的影响。尽管我们认为对受影响地区的大选结果没有重大影响，