TY  - JOUR
AU  - Manacorda,Marco
AU  - Miguel,Edward
AU  - Vigorito,Andrea
TI  - Government Transfers and Political Support
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14702
PY  - 2009
Y2  - February 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14702
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14702.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Marco Manacorda
Department of Economics
Queen Mary University of London
CEP - London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
UK
E-Mail: m.manacorda@lse.ac.uk

Edward Miguel
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: 510/642-7162
Fax: 510/642-6615
E-Mail: emiguel@econ.berkeley.edu

Andrea Vigorito
Instituto de Economia
Facultad de Ciencias Economicas
Universidad de la Republica
Joaquin Requena 1375
Montevideo 11200
Uruguay
E-Mail: andrea@iecon.ccee.edu.uy
AB  - 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.
ER  -