Drought-reliefs and Partisanship

Partisan bias when transferring funds across governments is an established phenomenon. 
We combine a model of symmetric information with selfish and office-motivated politicians and an RDD analysis based on close municipal elections to study partisan bias in the allocation of drought aid relief in Brazil. We identify a novel pattern of distributive politics whereby partisan bias materialises only before municipal elections, while it disappears before presidential elections. Furthermore, before mayoral elections, it fades for extreme (high or low) aridity levels while persisting for moderate levels. Our empirical results show that in this case alignment increases the probability of receiving aid relief by a factor of two (equivalent to 18.1 p.p.).  We use the Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) to measure aridity.

Geographic Coverage:  V  Brazil

Time Period:   1996 – 2016

Data Type(s):  aggregate data; event/transaction data; geographic information system (GIS) data; other

Data Source:   Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia
Sistema Integrado de Informações sobre Desastres Naturais - S2ID
Tribunal Superior Eleitoral
IBGE

Unit(s) of Observation:    Electoral outcomes at the municipality level; rain precipitation and evapotranspiration; declaration (from the federal government) of the state of emergency at the voting municipality level, motivated by aridity

Geographic Unit:   Brazil, municipalities