Government Transfers and Political Support

Marco Manacorda, Edward Miguel and Andrea Vigorito

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We estimate the impact of a large anti-poverty program - the Uruguayan PANES - on political support for thegovernment that implemented it. The program mainly consisted of a monthly cash transfer for a period ofroughly two and half years. Using the discontinuity in program assignment based on a pre-treatment score, wefind that beneficiary households are 21 to 28 percentage points more likely to favor the current government(relative to the previous government). Impacts on political support are larger among poorer households and forthose near the center of the political spectrum, consistent with the probabilistic voting model in politicaleconomy. Effects persist after the cash transfer program ends. We estimate that the annual cost of increasinggovernment political support by 1 percentage point is roughly 0.9% of annual government social expenditures.

Keywords: Conditional cash transfers; redistributive politics; voting; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-lam, nep-ltv, nep-pol and nep-pub
Date: 2009-03
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0912

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