ABSTRACT

This article examines whether an increase in political participation biased toward low-income voters – and concentrated in legislative elections – impacts federal representatives’ allocation of resources from the federal budget to Brazilian municipalities. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits the assignment of electronic voting to municipalities based on population size to identify the causal effect of enfranchisement on the allocation of federal public spending. We find that an increase of 1 percentage point in the valid-vote-to-turnout ratio for federal representatives in a municipality increases the allocation of funds from the federal budget by 3.3%, and that experienced politicians are more responsive to the enfranchisement of low-income voters.

摘要

本文研究偏向低收入选民的政治参与的增加（并集中在立法选举中）是否会影响联邦代表从联邦预算到巴西市政当局的资源分配。我们使用回归不连续性设计，该设计利用基于人口规模的电子投票分配给市政当局，以识别公民权对联邦公共支出分配的因果关系。我们发现，在自治市中，联邦代表的有效投票率与投票率相比提高1个百分点，会使联邦预算中的资金分配增加3.3％，而且经验丰富的政治家对低收入者的选任权更加敏感收入的选民。