PUBLICATIONS

Cash transfers, clientelism, and political enfranchisement: Evidence from Brazil (Journal of Public Economics, 2019)
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WORKING PAPERS

Do Reelection Incentives Improve Policy Implementation? Accountability vs. Political Targeting
​(Revise and Resubmit at the Quarterly Journal of Political Science)

Although reelection prospects can improve policy implementation by incumbents, they can also create incentives for politically-motivated targeting of resources, which might jeopardize both distributional efficiency and electoral competition. While existing empirical tests typically focus on these potential countervailing incentives in isolation, this paper analyzes their net effect in the context of Bolsa Família (BF) in Brazil, using a regression discontinuity design and data on nearly seven million households from the program’s registry. The evidence supports political targeting over accountability: mayors with reelection incentives are four times more likely to include nonpoor, ineligible households into the policy. This inclusion also improves the performance of incumbents in their reelection attempt. Evidence from both a survey with 11,000+ households and the heterogeneity in the main results suggests that the poor fails to keep mayors accountable due to the lack of precise information about the policy. This mechanism is framed within the context of a simple accountability model. Finally, anomalous income reporting patterns in the registry also show that this electorally-driven fraud is more common for households enrolled by public servants politically connected to the mayor​.
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A Variance Decomposition Approach for Bounding Neighborhood Effects
​(with Scott Abramson)
​(Under Review)

Political scientists have pointed to neighborhood contexts as an important factor explaining individual voter behavior. This paper presents a variance-decomposition method for placing bounds on the impact of neighborhood effects on political attitudes. The method should be used to complement rather than to replace other empirical approaches used by the discipline in the study of neighborhood effects, as it provides less restrictive assumptions than most observational studies, and a broader perspective on the aggregate influence of neighborhoods than the typical experimental design. We also present two applications using data from the universe of voters in North Carolina. We estimate that neighborhood effects explain at most 1.9% of the total variation in individual turnout decisions, and 4% of the observed variation in party registration, after accounting for the race of households. In both applications, household-specific traits are a much more relevant factor determining those individual outcomes.

Upon Request

Strategic Allocation of Anti-Clientelism Goods and the Breaking of Political Machines 
​(Revise and Resubmit at the American Journal of Political Science)

Successful machines deliver benefits that are revocable or perishable, so as to elicit voters' support while keeping them impoverished. Conversely, benefits that are irrevocable and durable can erode the grasp of machines on voters. This article explains why and how politicians allocate these benefits across constituencies, and tests the theory in Brazil with previously untapped administrative data from a water cisterns program, an archetypal anti-clientelism benefit. States allocate cisterns across municipalities based on two criteria: the mayor’s party, and her capacity to mobilize local clientelistic networks. In doing so, states weight potential gains from retrospective electoral rewards against losses inflicted to clientelistic activity. Accordingly, the empirical analysis shows that states favor municipalities governed by copartisans, but only where the mayor’s mobilization capacity is weak. Where it is strong, states favor municipalities led by the opposition, as they would rather undermine opposing local machines than their own.

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Can the Right Credibly Offer Pro-poor Policies? Programmatic Politics and Candidate Selection in Brazil
​(with Zuheir Desai)
(Under Review)

Conventional accounts attribute the success of the Right in poor nations to clientelism, identity-based appeals, or other non-policy strategies. We develop a novel theory to explain how Right-wing parties can win elections when voters value programmatic brands, and distinctions between the Right and the Left are salient. The Right is only competitive in very poor regions when its policy position is close to that of the Left. To credibly promise pro-poor policies that are far from its brand, the Right nominates candidates that are less educated than those of the Left, and descriptively closer to the median poor voter. We test our theory in three Brazilian municipal elections using a regression discontinuity design and voter surveys. In poor municipalities, Right-wing parties match Left-wing parties’ policies, but nominate less educated candidates. In wealthier municipalities the pattern shifts: the Right offers less redistribution, but candidates are similarly educated.

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Sleeping with the Enemy: Effective Representation under Dynamic Electoral Competition
​(with Sergio Montero and Gabriel López-Moctezuma)
(Under Review)

Electoral coalitions between ideologically incompatible parties - among other unconventional electoral strategies - may appear to threaten effective representation, signaling a breakdown of programmatic politics. However, this perspective overlooks parties' and voters' dynamic considerations. We propose and estimate a model of dynamic electoral competition in which a short-term ideology compromise, via an electoral coalition, offers opposition parties (and voters) the opportunity to remove an entrenched incumbent party from office, thus leveling the playing field in the future. This tradeoff provides a previously unrecognized rationale for electoral coalition formation. We take our model to data from Mexican municipal elections between 1995-2016 and show that coalitions between parties on opposite ends of the ideology spectrum have in fact served as an instrument of democratic consolidation.

Coming Soon

WORK IN PROGRESS

Pricing Partisanship: Evidence From North Carolina's Housing Markets (with Scott Abramson)

Building Weak Parties with Ambitious Politicians (with Sergio Montero and Gabriel López-Moctezuma)

Do More Representatives Improve Representation? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

​Do Programmatic Policies Induce Political Engagement?