PUBLICATIONS AND ACCEPTED PAPERS
Larger Legislatures and the Cost of Political Brokerage: Evidence from Brazil
(Accepted, Journal of Politics)
Pre-print
Sleeping with the Enemy: Effective Representation under Dynamic Electoral Competition
(American Journal of Political Science, 2021)
(with Sergio Montero and Gabriel López-Moctezuma)
Pre-print | Link | Replication
Can Descriptive Representation Help The Right Win Votes From The Poor? Evidence From Brazil
(American Journal of Political Science, 2021)
(with Zuheir Desai)
Pre-print | Link | Replication
Strategic Allocation of Irrevocable and Durable Benefits
(American Journal of Political Science, 2020)
Pre-print | Link | Replication
Do Reelection Incentives Improve Policy Implementation? Accountability vs. Political Targeting
(Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2021)
Pre-print | Link | Replication
Cash transfers, clientelism, and political enfranchisement: Evidence from Brazil
(Journal of Public Economics, 2019)
Pre-print | Link
(Accepted, Journal of Politics)
Pre-print
Sleeping with the Enemy: Effective Representation under Dynamic Electoral Competition
(American Journal of Political Science, 2021)
(with Sergio Montero and Gabriel López-Moctezuma)
Pre-print | Link | Replication
Can Descriptive Representation Help The Right Win Votes From The Poor? Evidence From Brazil
(American Journal of Political Science, 2021)
(with Zuheir Desai)
Pre-print | Link | Replication
Strategic Allocation of Irrevocable and Durable Benefits
(American Journal of Political Science, 2020)
Pre-print | Link | Replication
Do Reelection Incentives Improve Policy Implementation? Accountability vs. Political Targeting
(Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2021)
Pre-print | Link | Replication
Cash transfers, clientelism, and political enfranchisement: Evidence from Brazil
(Journal of Public Economics, 2019)
Pre-print | Link
WORKING PAPERS
Legislature Resizing with Rent-seeking Politicians: Evidence from Brazil
(Submitted)
(Submitted)
Legislature size affects the quality of democracy. However, the existent scholarship still lacks a positive theory of resizing in contexts of low accountability and pervasive rent-seeking, where the often posed trade-off between greater efficiency and better representation might be irrelevant. This article fills this gap with a new logic: rent-seeking politicians decide whether to expand legislatures following a trade-off between better reelection prospects and a dilution in rents. Evidence comes from a regression discontinuity design, and a wave of 3,000+ council expansions in Brazilian municipalities. The likelihood that legislators approve an expansion decreases with the size of the mayoral coalition in the chamber, given that coalition councilors lose more from rent dilution. This effect is higher for politicians from office-seeking parties, and in areas with more patronage. Finally, this mechanism seems to trump concerns with representation, as I find no evidence that representation deficits in the council drive the expansion.
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In developing countries, political incumbents commonly exercise influence over bureaucrats through monitoring or patronage. We investigate a new channel: their politicization, a phenomenon where bureaucrats formally join political parties while in office. Our proposed argument is simple: bureaucrats that deliver popular policies accumulate electoral capital among poor voters, either due to good performance or political capture. This makes them valuable assets for the networks of rent‐seeking incumbents. We document this practice using administrative data on the universe of public employees in Brazil, plus detailed information on 55,000 bureaucrats that personally interviewed households for admission in the world’s largest redistributive policy (Bolsa Família). Using a regression discontinuity design in close mayoral elections, we find that: (i) incumbent coalitions enlist more bureaucrats than the opposition for their party networks; (ii) this pattern is stronger for interviewers; and (iii) the effects are even stronger for those with higher exposure to voters.
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WORK IN PROGRESS
COVID-19 and Polarization in Spending: Theory and Evidence from Brazil (with Zuheir Desai and Scott Tyson)
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)
Political Targeting in Rural Insurance
A Variance Decomposition Approach for Bounding Neighborhood Effects (with Scott Abramson)
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)
Political Targeting in Rural Insurance
A Variance Decomposition Approach for Bounding Neighborhood Effects (with Scott Abramson)
