Code for: Do Tuition Subsidies Raise Political Participation?

Civic externalities motivate public education expenditures, but estimates of the civic returns to large-scale education subsidies are scarce. We use 16 million financial aid applications and a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate how the United States' largest tuition-free college program impacts political participation. We find that each of the 2.6 million awards increased a student's voter turnout rate by 4 to 12 percentage points in 2020, raising total voter turnout by 1 percentage point and Biden's margin of victory by 0.5 percentage points in the awarding state. We calculate that 1 out of every 66 voters cast a ballot because of the tuition subsidy and find evidence consistent with peer socialization, among other mechanisms. The results are externally validated with another RD design using 2.5 million students local to a notch in the generosity of another financial aid program. Our findings demonstrate that the civic externalities of education spending can be large enough to sway elections.