Replication Data for: Civic Education and Voting under Authoritarianism: A Field Experiment during the 2021 Vietnamese National Assembly Election

The literature on authoritarian elections offers several theories for why authoritarian regimes hold flawed elections, but has made less progress on why citizens participate in them. While early scholarship emphasized economic incentives and clientelistic payoffs, a growing body of research highlights the role of non-economic motivations, such as civic duty. Building on this work, we hypothesize that authoritarian regimes can use civic education to increase voter participation in elections. We test our logic with a Get Out the Vote (GOTV) experiment during the 2021 Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA) election. Leveraging Vietnam’s efforts to engage youth voters, we amplified a government-approved civic education treatment that explained the VNA's role and citizens' electoral responsibilities. While the treatment did not increase turnout, the intervention meaningfully boosted interest in the VNA and may have reduced illegal proxy voting—a common practice in Vietnam where individuals cast ballots on behalf of absent family members.