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When Mayors Deliver: Political Alignment and Well-being

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Abstract

While in recent decades developing countries have achieved significant improvements in well-being, disparities within countries persist. Focusing on municipalities in which health services are decentralized and patronage is prevalent, we argue that a little-studied factor, the alignment between mayors and governors, plays an important role in explaining differences in infant mortality rates. In the context of widespread clientelism, lack of alignment deprives mayors of substantial discretionary resources. This generates incentives for nonaligned mayors to focus on improving decentralized social services under their control to cultivate voter support, producing better welfare outcomes associated with these services. Employing an original dataset of metropolitan municipalities in Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1991 and 2018, we find that mayoral alignment is associated with higher infant mortality, a critical metric of well-being, and with lower levels of health service provision. Local health services in turn reduce infant mortality rates in our data. These results are robust when we control for relevant socioeconomic and political factors, such as electoral competition, protest, and the presence of the state in slums, where health risks are higher.

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Fig. 1

Source: Data from Dirección Provincial de Estadística, Buenos Aires Province

Fig. 2

Source: Data from Dirección Provincial de Estadística, Buenos Aires Province

Fig. 3

Source: Data from Dirección Provincial de Estadística, Buenos Aires Province and INDEC

Fig. 4

Source: Data from Dirección Provincial de Estadística, Buenos Aires Province and INDEC

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Notes

  1. We follow Sen’s (2000) view of human development as well-being, consisting of the possibility to choose the life one wants to live, or, as phrased by Deaton, a life worth living (Deaton 2013:7).

  2. Health is a fundamental aspect of well-being (Deaton, 2013, p. 24), and infant mortality is a good measure of population health overall (McGuire, 2020).

  3. In Argentina, provincial constitutions establish the relations between provinces and municipalities. Buenos Aires, where one-third of the country’s population resides, is more decentralized than the other provinces.

  4. This is especially the case of influential literature on clientelism in the region. See, for example, Auyero (2001) and Weitz-Shapiro (2012).

  5. See Garay, Palmer-Rubin, and Poertner (2020); Hilgers (2008); Szwarcberg (2015); Thachil (2016).

  6. The PJ is considered a nonideological patronage machine led by either more left-wing or conservative factions (see Levitsky and Roberts 2011). Other parties are on the center left and center right. See Calvo and Murillo (2019) on variation in nonpolicy politics across political parties.

  7. For an exception, see Szwarcberg (2015); Garay and Maroto (2019).

  8. This is similar to the criteria used by Cherny et al. (2015) and Niedzwiecki (2016, 2018) to classify alignment between governors and the president.

  9. Note that we do not consider mayors who support alternative candidates to those of governors in primary elections to be “nonaligned.” An example of a nonaligned mayor is that of Jesus Cariglino of the PJ, who was mayor of Malvinas Argentinas from 1995 through 2015. Between 2003 and 2015, he was not aligned with the governor. As the PJ became increasingly divided, he supported executive and legislative lists that competed with those endorsed by the governor (see Table 8 in Appendix for a summary of the evolution of the percentage of aligned mayors across mayoral terms).

  10. See Bonvecchi and Lodola (2011) on subnational units’ preference for discretionary vis-à-vis programmatic federal transfers, and Eaton (2006) and Garay and Maroto (2019) on mayors’ use of revenue-sharing transfers in weakly institutionalized environments.

  11. For example, 88.5% of respondents to a survey in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires in 2003 reported that ensuring access to health services should be a responsibility of the government (survey data from Collier and Handlin 2009).

  12. Interview, May 18, 2017.

  13. Interviews with local public officials conducted in 2017 corroborated these fears and concerns.

  14. See Mainwaring (2018) on party institutionalization.

  15. While people with health insurance may use public healthcare services as well, they constitute a much smaller share of users than outsiders and are not significant in our consultations metric. Based on our interview data, in districts with large municipal hospitals, public officials estimate users with health insurance to be a small share of total users during the period studied.

  16. Interviews with local authorities in a district that provides large numbers of consultations confirmed that, in order to contain costs, they space out medical appointments (thus reducing the number of consultations). Interviews with secretary of social assistance and with top official of a nonaligned district. May 10, 2017.

  17. State capacity, or the state’s ability to get things done (Centeno et al. 2017; Soifer 2015), entails the means and reach to achieve state goals throughout a given territory (see also, Touchton et al. 2017; Ziblatt 2008).

  18. We estimated the values of this variable for previous years using systematic data on the creation of each of these neighborhoods.

  19. It should be noted that in 2015 there was very little variability across municipalities in the presence of health facilities close to slums. Data from RPPVAP.

  20. Estimated with data from RPPVAP, available here: http://www.sstuv.gba.gov.ar/idehab/

  21. To address inflation, we converted all data to 2003 constant prices. We also estimated the models using the existing data for the years for which these data are not available, and the results remain unchanged.

  22. Our protest data goes from 1996 through 2011, reducing the number of observations in these models (see Appendix, Table 1).

  23. Operationalized as the share of children between 5 and 18 who attend school. Schooling is compulsory from preschool through high school.

  24. See, for instance, Deaton (2013).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants at the MIT Quantitative Works-in-Progress Working Group, the participants at the GTAL workshop, especially Kent Eaton and Agustina Giraudy, and Santiago Anria for their comments. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the Editor of SCID for their comments and suggestions. Sofia Elverdin and Martin Maximino carried out research assistance for this project and Maria Gould and Camila Perez Leiros provided editorial assistance for this paper. Data collection was funded by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

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  1. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Candelaria Garay

  2. MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Emilia Simison

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Appendix for When Mayors Deliver

Appendix for When Mayors Deliver

Contents

Descriptive Statistics.

Please see Table 6.

Table 6 Sources and Descriptive Statistics by Year
Full size table

Please see Table 7.

Table 7 Descriptive Statistics by Mayoral Administration, Further Control Variables
Full size table

Please see Table 8.

Table 8 Political Variables by Mayoral Term
Full size table

Robustness Checks

  • Models with Random Effects

Please see Table 9.

Table 9 Main Models with Random Effects, I
Full size table

Please see Table 10.

Table 10 Main Models with Random Effects, II
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Please see Table 11.

Table 11 Model with Outsider Municipality and Distance from CABA
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  • Further Specifications

Please see Table 12.

Table 12 Models with Lagged IMR, NBI, and Hospital Beds
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  • Placebo Test: School Attendance Models.

Please see Table 13.

Table 13 School Attendance as Dependent Variable
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Garay, C., Simison, E. When Mayors Deliver: Political Alignment and Well-being. St Comp Int Dev 57, 303–336 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-022-09357-w

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