The electoral benefits of unemployment, clientelism and distributive politics

Agustin Casas ()

World Development, 2020, vol. 129, issue C

Abstract: We show that in the month prior to the 2003 Argentine presidential election, the expenditures of an Argentine poverty relief program exhibit a partisan bias. Taking into consideration the number of potential recipients (the unemployed with children 18 years old or less), the counties that were ideologically against the incumbent received a disproportionately large amount of the spending. Hence, instead of targeting swing or core districts, as established in the distributive politics literature, in Argentina the incumbent targeted opposition strongholds. To identify these effects and to classify districts into swing, core and opposition ones, we exploit the 2001 crises in Argentina. In particular, we use the 2001 political discontent that led to 15% of blank and null votes to estimate swing districts. Finally, we also show that this tactical spending had an electoral purpose. In counties where it was arguably cheaper to monitor the recipients’ voting behavior, the spending was significantly larger. In return, the clientelist exchange took place in districts with greater spending and monitoring. Thus, the politicians’ incentives to design an appropriate poverty relief program may be at odds with their electoral motivation.

Keywords: Unemployment benefits; Clientelism; Distributive politics; Cash transfers program (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X20300346
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:wdevel:v:129:y:2020:i:c:s0305750x20300346

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.104908

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().