Give and Take: Voting Rights and Public Policy in Latin America in the 20th Century  Toke S. Aidt y University of Cambridge Dalibor S. Eterovic* ; z University of Cambridge Preliminary Version Prepared for the EPSC 2006 December 17, 2005 Abstract The allocation of voting rights can have a fundamental impact on policy choices. This paper quanties the impact of political transitions between democracy and autocracy and the impact on gender and literacy restrictions on the right to vote on scal and social outcomes in 18 Latin American countries during the 20th century. We estimate a panel model and report the following ndings: i) regime type matters for outcomes, with dictatorships taxing more than democracies; ii) womens su/rage increased enrollment in primary education, but did not a/ect scal outcomes; iii) literacy restrictions reduce the size of government, but, surprisingly, does not lead to lower enrollment in primary education; iv) dictatorships have larger armies and military expenditure than democracies. Key words: Democracy, dictatorship, voting franchise, female su/rage, literacy restrictions. JEL Codes : D7; H11. 1 Introduction Twentieth century Latin America provides an almost perfect laboratory for the study of political regime transitions and reforms. For example, since independence, Peru has  The results reported in this paper are preliminary and should not be quoted without permission from the authors. We would like to thank Jonnanes Wieland, Cassandra Sweet, Guido Tabellini and the participants in the session on political institutions at the LACEA 2005 meeting in Paris for helpful comments. y Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9DD, United Kingdom. E-mail: toke.aidt@econ.cam.ac.uk. Phone: +44 1223 335231. Fax: +44 1223 335475. z Corresponding Author and presenter at conference: Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9DD, United Kingdom. E-mail: dse20@econ.cam.ac.uk. 1