Drought-Reliefs and Partisanship

Francisco Cavalcanti (), Federico Boffa, Amedeo Piolatto and Christian Fons-Rosen

No 1337, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We analyse partisan biases in the allocation of central discretionary transfers in a federal country. We study drought aid-relief in Brazil, where presidential and municipal elections alternate every two years, to identify a novel pattern of distributive politics, determined by the sequence of central and local elections. In particular, we show that alignment advantage materialises only in the period before municipal elections, while it disappears in the period before presidential elections. Furthermore, we show that even before mayoral elections partisanship only counts for districts with intermediate levels of aridity, where being aligned causes an increase by a factor of almost two (equivalent to +18.1 p.p.) in the chances of receiving aid-relief. We rationalise this pattern in a model with office-motivated politicians and rational voters.

Keywords: federalism; distributive politics; partisan alignment; presidential elections; aridity; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H11 H7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/1337-file.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Drought‐Reliefs and Partisanship (2024)
Working Paper: Drought-reliefs and Partisanship (2022)
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:bge:wpaper:1337

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().