Electoral E ¤ ects of Fiscal Transfers : Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Local Executive Elections in Brazil , 1982-1988

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Litschig, Stephan Morrison, Kevin M. August, David
Copyright Year	2009
Abstract	Do resource transfers from the central government to sub-national governments a¤ect local electoral contests? Because politics usually matters for the allocation of public resources, empirical studies of this topic face a problem of simultaneous causality bias. This paper provides the rst quasi-experimental evidence on electoral e¤ects of resource transfers for local incumbent governments. Using regression-discontinuity analysis of a population-based revenue-sharing mechanism in Brazil, we estimate the transfers’e¤ect on re-election probabilities in the 1988 mayoral elections. Our results suggest that increasing resource transfers by 30% increased the re-election probability of local non-aligned incumbent parties by about 35 percentage points. The same resource di¤erential had no statistically signi cant e¤ect on the re-election probability of the PDS, the party of the authoritarian regime. Evaluating hypotheses for these heterogeneous responses, we conclude that the PDS’profound unpopularity during the transition period made the transfers’electoral bene t unobservable.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://leitner.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/resources/papers/ElectoralEffects.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://www.yale.edu/leitner/resources/papers/ElectoralEffects.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article