Abstract
Electoral theories of democracy imply electoral competition insures accountability. Using data on local elections, socioeconomic factors, and municipal budgets from more than 5,000 municipalities in Brazil for the years 1996, 2000, and 2004, we find that municipalities with more competitive elections allocate less to social spending compared to municipalities with little political competition. We argue that previous theory on political competition and public goods obscures the critical role that financial resources play in shaping the dynamics of social spending and political competition. Municipalities with small budgets lack the resources necessary to engineer convincing electoral victories. Where resources are negligible, voter turnout is low, and incumbents rarely win reelection. Incumbent parties in municipalities with large financial resources win big. Armed with adequate resources, incumbent parties mobilize voters and win by large margins. This new argument and evidence reconcile contradictory findings in the existing literature on competition and public goods.
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Notes
There is a well-developed literature on the incumbency advantage in the USA, which has demonstrated that US legislative incumbents have a strong advantage in elections over challenge. Reasons for this advantage include the ability to provide favors, gain visibility, and raise money for campaigning (Erikson 1971), redistricting (Cox and Katz 1999), the seniority system, which gives voters an incentive to favor incumbents (McKelvey and Riezman 1992), and the scare-off effect of high-quality candidates choosing not to run against incumbents (Cox and Katz 1996). Cox and Morgenstern argue that the increase in the incumbency advantage is due to larger budgets (1993).
It is important to note that in focusing on social spending, we are intentionally avoiding the contentious battle over whether spending in health, education, and housing represents spending on public or private goods. Empirically, it is quite difficult to distinguish between public expenditures that are targeted narrowly and those that are targeted more broadly (a school, for example, may be a broad public good, but the contract to build the school clearly benefits specific interests). For the sake of simplicity, we assume that most politicians pursue a combination of strategies, including rewarding key supporters, and broader efforts to bolster public opinion (Diaz-Cayeros 2008). Health, education, and housing spending in different contexts can be either narrowly or broadly focused. Our argument does not rely on assumptions about the true nature of public spending. As Kitshelt and Wilkinson convincingly argue, politicians can build support both through patron–client linkages and through programmatic ones. Critically, both strategies require financial resources. Politicians with relatively more to spend simply have more freedom to adopt different strategies than those who are not equally endowed.
The same relationship that holds for social spending also holds for total municipal spending as well (Appendix).
For a discussion of the advantages of subnational quantitative analysis see Snyder (2001).
The estimates reported above are stable: we subjected them to a number of tests to gage their stability. To make sure the results were not driven by swings in annual spending, we calculated the mean levels of spending for 1996–1999 and 2001–2005. We checked to see whether competition in 2000 had any association with the difference between the two averages for those years (see Model 3 in Table 3). We found political competition had a negative association with the difference in spending between the second period 2001–2005 and the first 1996–1999. We also took the mean level of spending between 1996 and 2005 and regressed it on the mean level of competition between three different elections (1996, 2000, and 2004); The mean level of political competition was strongly correlated with the mean level of social spending. Finally, to account for the important differences between Brazilian states--remember the models so far include regional dummy variables--we re-estimated the regression for the 2004 election using state fixed effects. Including state fixed effects had no substantive impact on the results.
As the regressions in Appendix show, the results are not simply capturing the differences between the big metropolitan areas in the country and those of the small rural villages or a relationship that only exists at high levels of political competition. Instead, incumbent parties with big budgets are more likely to win in municipalities above and below the mean of political competition (models 4 and 5). Likewise, financial resources make incumbent party victory more likely in both large and small municipalities alike (models 6 and 7).
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Boulding, C., Brown, D.S. Political Competition and Local Social Spending: Evidence from Brazil. St Comp Int Dev 49, 197–216 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-013-9145-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-013-9145-8