Do Anti-Poverty Programs Sway Voters? Experimental Evidence from Uganda

Christopher Blattman, Mathilde Emeriau and Nathan Fiala

No 23035, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: A Ugandan government program allowed groups of young people to submit proposals to start skilled enterprises. Among 535 eligible proposals, the government randomly selected 265 to receive grants of nearly $400 per person. Blattman et al. (2014) showed that, after four years, the program raised employment by 17% and earnings 38%. This paper shows that, rather than rewarding the government in elections, beneficiaries increased opposition party membership, campaigning, and voting. Higher incomes are associated with opposition support, and we hypothesize that financial independence frees the poor to express political preferences publicly, being less reliant on patronage and other political transfers.

JEL-codes: C93 D72 F35 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-exp and nep-pol
Note: DEV
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Christopher Blattman & Mathilde Emeriau & Nathan Fiala, 2018. "Do Anti-Poverty Programs Sway Voters? Experimental Evidence from Uganda," The Review of Economics and Statistics, vol 100(5), pages 891-905.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23035.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do anti-poverty programs sway voters? Experimental evidence from Uganda (2016)
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:nbr:nberwo:23035

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23035

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().