Voting with one’s neighbors: Evidence from migration within Mexico

•Movers to blocks with higher turnout are themselves more likely to vote.•A mover’s turnout history influences the turnout of her neighbors at destination.•Same-block neighbors tend to update/renew their voter IDs on the same day. We study how proximate neighbors affect one’s propensity to vote using data on 12 million registered voters in Mexico. To identify this effect, we exploit idiosyncratic variation at the neighborhood block level resulting from approximately one million relocation decisions. We find that when individuals move to blocks where people vote more (less) they themselves start voting more (less). We show that this finding is not the result of selection into neighborhoods or of place-based factors that determine turnout, but rather peer effects. Consistent with this claim, we find a contagion effect for non-movers and show that neighbors from the same block are much more likely to perform an electoral procedure on the same exact day as neighbors who live on different blocks within a neighborhood.