If policies make politics, can they also make politicians? We argue that being a bureaucrat with discretion over policy benefits can catalyze political ambitions and boost electoral success. As agents of the state rather than parties or interest groups, such bureaucrats wield a broadly accepted political currency. We examine the political careers of Brazilian bureaucrats who issue DAPs, a document granting benefits to small farmers. Leveraging a panel analysis from 2004 to 2020, we show that as bureaucrats issue more DAPs, they are more likely to become candidates, gain votes, and win election. DAP issuers run for office at higher rates than other public-facing bureaucrats with less control over policy benefits, suggesting that discretion is the key political currency, not social status or public contact. Our analysis underscores how the adoption of means-tested social policies can create new sources of political capital and brokerage in areas long dominated by traditional elites.

AbstractWhen do voters punish corrupt politicians? Heterogeneous views about the importance of corruption can determine whether or not increased information enhances accountability. If partisan cleavages correlate with the importance voters place on corruption, then the consequences of information may vary by candidate, even when voters identify multiple candidates as corrupt. We provide evidence of this mechanism from a field experiment in a mayoral election in Brazil where a reputable interest group declared both candidates corrupt. We distributed fliers in the runoff mayoral election in São Paulo. Informing voters about the challenger's record reduced turnout by 1.9 percentage points and increased the opponent's vote by 2.6 percentage points. Informing voters about the incumbent's record had no effect on behavior. We attribute this divergent finding to differences in how each candidate's supporters view corruption. Using survey data and a survey experiment, we show that the challenger's supporters are more willing to punish their candidate for corruption, while the incumbent's supporters lack this inclination.

Do voters reward politicians for the quality of public services? We address this question by studying voters’ responses to signals of municipal school quality in Brazil, a setting particularly favorable to electoral accountability. Findings from a regression discontinuity design and a field experiment are strikingly consistent. Contrary to expectations, signals of school quality decrease electoral support for the local incumbent. However, we find the expected effect among citizens for whom school quality should be most salient—parents with children in municipal schools. Using an online survey experiment, we argue that voters who do not value education interpret school quality as an indicator of municipal policy priorities and perceive trade-offs with other services. Voters may hold politicians accountable not only for their competence but also for their representation of potentially conflicting interests—a fact that complicates the simple logic behind many accountability interventions.

We describe our plan for a meta analysis of a collection of seven studies on the impact of information on voting behavior in developing countries. The seven studies are being conducted simultaneously by seven separate research teams under a single "Metaketa" grant round administered by EGAP and University of California, Berkeley's Center on the Politics of Development. This analysis plan has been produced before launch of any of the seven projects and provides the analysis for the joint assessment of results from the studies. Individual studies have separate pre-analysis plans with greater detail, registered prior to the launch of each study.

We show that Brazilian voters strongly sanction malfeasant mayors when presented with hypothetical scenarios but take no action when given the same information about their own mayor. Partnering with the State Accounts Court of Pernambuco, we conducted a field experiment during the 2016 municipal elections in which the treatment group received information about official wrongdoing by their mayor. The treatment has no effect on self-reported voting behavior after the election, yet when informing about malfeasance in the context of a vignette experiment, we are able to replicate the strong negative effect found in prior studies. We argue that voters' behavior in the abstract reflects the comparatively strong norm against corruption in Brazil. Yet on Election Day, their behavior is constrained by factors such as attitudes toward local political dynasties and the greater salience of more pressing concerns like employment and health services.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

Recent emphasis on credible causal designs has led to the expectation that scholars justify their research designs by testing the plausibility of their causal identification assumptions, often through balance and placebo tests. Yet current practice is to use statistical tests with an inappropriate null hypothesis of no difference, which can result in equating nonsignificant differences with significant homogeneity. Instead, we argue that researchers should begin with the initial hypothesis that the data are inconsistent with a valid research design, and provide sufficient statistical evidence in favor of a valid design. When tests are correctly specified so that difference is the null and equivalence is the alternative, the problems afflicting traditional tests are alleviated. We argue that equivalence tests are better able to incorporate substantive considerations about what constitutes good balance on covariates and placebo outcomes than traditional tests. We demonstrate these advantages with applications to natural experiments.

Mosquito-borne illnesses present significant health challenges to the developing world. If citizens are informed about their government's efforts to combat these diseases, will they reward incumbents who have performed well and punish those who have done poorly at this task? Electoral sanctioning requires that combatting disease be a sufficiently salient concern, which, in turn, is likely to depend upon subjective perceptions of the risks posed by particular illnesses. Epidemics typically prompt stronger risk perceptions than endemic diseases, but where both types circulate jointly, the more familiar endemic disease may determine public reactions. The salience of health threats also varies among individuals; those with a self-interest in prevention or a personal connection to the effects of mosquito-borne illnesses may react more strongly. This study presents the results of a face-to-face survey experiment in Pernambuco, Brazil, informing subjects about their mayor's use of federal funds to combat mosquito-borne illnesses such as dengue (an endemic disease) and Zika and chikungunya (both epidemics). We examine the effect of this information on intended vote for the mayor's reelection. For the full sample, the treatment has no significant effect. However, we find a large and significant punishment effect among voters who know someone affected by microcephaly or the Zika virus. Drawing on survey and focus group evidence, we argue that most voters fail to act upon our treatment information because mosquito control is a low-salience concern primarily associated with endemic rather than epidemic diseases. Our study constitutes the first experimental evidence as to whether informing citizens about government public health efforts affects voting behavior. Our results suggests that, where similar epidemic and endemic diseases circulate together, informational campaigns aiming to induce electoral accountability should also seek to boost the salience of the information by educating the public about the difference between familiar and newer threats.

To enhance government accountability, reformers have advocated strengthening institutions of horizontal accountability, particularly auditing institutions that can punish lawbreaking elected officials. Yet, these institutions differ in their willingness to punish corrupt politicians, which is often attributed to variation in their degree of independence from the political branches. Taking advantage of a randomized natural experiment embedded in Brazil's State Audit Courts, we study how variation in the appointment mechanisms for choosing auditors affects political accountability. We show that auditors appointed under few constraints by elected officials punish lawbreaking politiciansparticularly co-partisansat lower rates than bureaucrats insulated from political influence. In addition, we find that even when executives are heavily constrained in their appointment of auditors by meritocratic and professional requirements, auditors still exhibit a pro-politician bias in decision making. Our results suggest that removing bias requires a level of insulation from politics rare among institutions of horizontal accountability.

This chapter examines the evolution of mass participation and elite contestation across 17 elections for Brazil's Chamber of Deputies. While participation has increased dramatically through this period, de facto universal suffrage was not achieved until 2002 when enfranchisement barriers due to ballot construction were finally removed. Yet as political participation has universalized, elections have grown less competitive, at least as measured by the incumbency advantage. The chapter shows that the electoral advantage that accrues to incumbents was initially negligible, but began to grow during the military dictatorship and has recently reached historically high levels. More reassuringly, it documents that the proportion of family dynasties within the chamber has not grown and that incumbency plays little or role in their formation.

State weakness can be self-reinforcing through electoral channels. Paramilitaries flourish where states are incapable of eliminating oppositional foes like insurgencies; paramilitaries can also, we argue, penetrate the state via elections and further weaken it from within. The state may thus tolerate paramilitaries initially, but find itself unable to eliminate them later. Rio de Janeiro’s police-linked milı́cias demonstrate these mechanisms at work. Their domination of hundreds of slums bore political fruit in 2006, when paramilitary leaders and allies were elected state legislators. We exploit the timing of paramilitary expansion, identifying— through difference-in-differences analysis of polling-station returns—a substantial positive effect of territorial domination on paramilitary-aligned candidates’ vote share. Qualitative and quantitative evidence shows that winning allied legislators consistently sought to weaken state repression against paramilitaries, possibly contributing to their resilience even after an exogenous increase in state repression since 2008. Electioneering by armed groups thus presents a threat to democratic state consolidation. ∗Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. †Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago.

We describe our plan for a meta analysis of a collection of seven studies on the impact of information on voting behavior in developing countries. The seven studies are being conducted simultaneously by seven separate research teams under a single “metaketa” grant round administered by EGAP and University of California, Berkeley’s Center on the Politics of Development. This analysis plan has been produced before launch of any of the seven projects and provides the analysis for the joint assessment of results from the studies. Individual studies have separate pre-analysis plans with greater detail, registered prior to the launch of each study. ∗Author annotations are: # 1 Benin study, #2 Mexico study, #3 India study, #4 Brazil study, #5 Burkina Faso study, #6 Uganda 1 study, #7 Uganda 2 study, #8 the metaketa committee. We have many people to thank for generous thoughts and comments on this project including Jaclyn Leaver, Abigail Long, Betsy Paluck, Ryan Moore, Ana de la O, Don Green, Richard Sedlmayr, and participants at EGAP 13. The meteteka is funded by an anonymous donor.

Studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate. We argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate, but can also shape its composition. Across the world, machines employ “voter buying” to import outsiders into their districts. Voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud, and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote choices. Our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in Brazil. A regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits—which undermined voter buying—decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points. Consistent with voter buying, these effects are significantly greater in municipalities with large voter inflows, and where neighboring municipalities had large voter outflows. Findings are robust to an alternative research design using a different data set.

One of the most robust findings on political institutions is that compulsory voting (CV) reduces the participation gap between poorer and wealthier voters. We present evidence that in Brazil, the largest country to use such a rule, CVincreasesinequality in turnout. We use individual-level data on 140 million Brazilian citizens and two age-based discontinuities to estimate the heterogeneous effects of CV by educational achievement, a strong proxy for socioeconomic status. Evidence from both thresholds shows that the causal effect of CV on turnout among the more educated is at least twice the size of the effect among those with less education. To explain this result, which is the opposite of what is predicted by the existing literature, we argue that nonmonetary penalties for abstention primarily affect middle- and upper-class voters and thus increase their turnout disproportionately. Survey evidence from a national sample provides evidence for the mechanism. Our results show that studies of CV should consider nonmonetary sanctions, as their effects can reverse standard predictions.

State weakness can be self-reinforcing, encouraging rebel or criminal groups to directly challenge state power, generating frontal conflicts that can further weaken the state. With paramilitaries—non-revolutionary, pro-government groups, often with informal ties to state forces—state-weakening occurs less through outright conflict than more oblique channels, including electoral politics. We show this through an analysis of Rio de Janeiro’s police-linked milı́cia groups. Once unique to a handful of favelas (slums), where they kept out the city’s powerful drug syndicates, milı́cias rapidly proliferated between 2003 and 2007 to control some 170 communities. The election of milı́cia leaders and sympathetic police-related candidates in 2006 led to speculation that armed coercion by milı́cias had effectively transformed dominated communities into electoral bailiwicks. We test this hypothesis through a difference-in-difference analysis of election results from 1998, 2002, and 2006, exploiting the timing of milı́cia expansion to estimate the impact of domination on voting behavior. Controlling for potential confounders with a neighborhood-level panel data set, we find that milı́cia rule causes the vote shares of police-affiliated candidates to increase dramatically. We then provide evidence of how milı́cias used political power to weaken state efforts to curtail their activities. ∗Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. †Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago.

When firms give money to candidates for public office, what return can they expect on their investment? Prior studies have been inconclusive, due to both methodological challenges and unique features of the U.S. political context on which they have focused. Using data from Brazil, we employ a regression discontinuity (RD) design to identify the effect of an electoral victory on government contracts for a candidate's corporate donors. Firms specializing in public-works projects can expect a substantial boost in contracts-at least 14 times the value of their contributions-when they donate to a federal-deputy candidate from the ruling Workers' Party (PT) and that candidate wins office. We find no effects among allied parties, indicating that the PT prioritizes this form of state spending for party strengthening rather than coalition management.

What are the political consequences of democratization assistance to regimes transitioning from authoritarian rule? By exploiting the downstream effects of a field experiment designed to encourage citizen monitoring of Georgia’s 2008 parliamentary elections, we evaluate the political consequences of one type of democracy promotion aid. The intervention increased citizen activism, but it also had the unanticipated effect of suppressing overall voter turnout by approximately 5%. We hypothesize that the civic education campaign was interpreted as a sign of increased political attention to a selected voting precinct, which suppressed opposition turnout. Two additional experiments provide additional evidence for the hypothesis.

workflow. If you are trying to fit a model to a large amount of data and hitting memory limits, it is likely easier to use the high memory EC2 instance with 68 GB of memory. On the other hand, if your data subsetting script is taking an hour or more to run, a cluster or multicore solution might be useful. In addition, some problems are not easily parallelized while others are not parallelizable at all. The type of algorithms that are easily parallelized, however, could serve as the subject of an entirely different article.