Drought‐Reliefs and Partisanship

We combine a model of symmetric information with selfish and office‐motivated politicians and a Regression Discontinuity Design analysis based on close municipal elections to study partisan bias in the allocation of drought aid relief in Brazil. We identify a novel pattern of distributive politics w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Oxford bulletin of economics and statistics 2024-04, Vol.86 (2), p.187-208
Main Authors: Boffa, Federico, Cavalcanti, Francisco, Fons‐Rosen, Christian, Piolatto, Amedeo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bias
Discontinuity
Drought
Local elections
Partisanship
Politics
Presidential elections
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Summary:We combine a model of symmetric information with selfish and office‐motivated politicians and a Regression Discontinuity Design analysis based on close municipal elections to study partisan bias in the allocation of drought aid relief in Brazil. We identify a novel pattern of distributive politics whereby partisan bias materialises only before municipal elections, while it disappears before presidential elections. Furthermore, before mayoral elections, it fades for extreme (high or low) aridity levels while persisting for moderate levels. Our empirical results show that in this case alignment increases the probability of receiving aid relief by a factor of two (equivalent to 18.1 percentage points).
ISSN:0305-9049
1468-0084
DOI:10.1111/obes.12560