Does partisan alignment affect the electoral reward of intergovernmental transfers?

Albert Solé-Ollé () and Pilar Sorribas-Navarro ()
Additional contact information
Albert Solé-Ollé: Universitat de Barcelona (UB); Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB); CESifo
Pilar Sorribas-Navarro: Universitat Barcelona (UB); Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

No 2008/2, Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

Abstract: In this paper we test the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants allocated to co-partisans buy more political support than grants allocated to local governments controlled by opposition parties. We use a rich Spanish database containing information about the grants received by 617 municipalities during the period 1993-2003 from two different upper-tier governments (Regional and Upper-local), as well as data of municipal voting behaviour at three electoral contests held at the different layers of government during this period. Therefore, we are able to estimate two different vote equations, analysing the effects of grants given to aligned and unaligned municipalities on the vote share of the incumbent party/parties at the regional and local elections. We account for the endogeneity of grants by instrumenting them with the average amount of grants distributed by upper-layer governments. The results suggest that grants given to co-partisans buy some political support, but that grants given to opposition parties do not bring any votes, suggesting that the grantee reaps as much political credit from intergovernmental grants as the grantor

Keywords: Voting; parties; grants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ieb.ub.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2008-IEB-WorkingPaper-02.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2008-2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().