Government Transfers and Political Support
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NBER Working Paper No. 14702
Issued in February 2009
NBER Program(s): PE POL
We estimate the impact of a large anti-poverty cash transfer program, the Uruguayan PANES, on political support for the government that implemented it. Using the discontinuity in program assignment based on a pre-treatment eligibility score, we find that beneficiary households are 11 to 14 percentage points more likely to favor the current government relative to the previous government. Political support effects persist after the program ends. A calibration exercise indicates that these persistent impacts are consistent with a model of rational but poorly informed voters learning about politicians’ redistributive preferences.
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This paper was revised on December 5, 2011 Acknowledgments
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