Causal Inference Final Project

Replication and extension of Sánchez-García, Rodon & Delgado-García (2025), Where has everyone gone? Depopulation and voting behaviour in Spain, European Journal of Political Research, 64, 296–319. DOI: 10.1111/1475-6765.12702.

Author: Giorgio Coppola. Hertie School, Causal Inference (Spring 2026).

Read the report here →

What's in the project

• Paper summary — research question, theoretical and empirical estimand, DAG, identification assumptions and challenges.
• Replication — Table 2 of the paper (controlled two-way fixed-effects estimates of depopulation on vote shares for PSOE, PP, UP, Cs, PANES, ES, Vox, 2011–2019).
• Extension — a grf causal forest on Vox vote share to test for heterogeneous treatment effects across municipalities.

Everything (fits, tables, figures, narrative) lives in final_project.qmd. The pre-rendered final_project.html and final_project.pdf are committed, so the document is readable without running anything.

Data

The authors' replication package is not redistributed here. To re-render the QMD you need to obtain it yourself.

• The article is at DOI 10.1111/1475-6765.12702; its data-availability statement points to the authors' replication archive.
• Extract the package contents into data_explore/sanchez_garcia/ (create the folder if needed). The symlinks under replication/database/ and replication/analysis_*.R resolve to files in that directory.

How to reproduce

quarto render final_project.qmd

Requires R and Quarto (and TinyTeX for the PDF: quarto install tinytex). The QMD installs its own R packages on first render. The causal-forest fit takes about a minute.