NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Government Transfers and Political Support

use a mirror
Use a mirror

download in pdf format
   (253 K)

email paper

Marco Manacorda, Edward Miguel, Andrea Vigorito

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.

This paper is available as PDF (253 K) or via email.

This paper was revised on December 5, 2011

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

Support
National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org

Contact Us