STRATEGIC ALLOCATION OF ANTI-CLIENTELISM GOODSAND THE BREAKING OF POLITICAL MACHINES∗

Anderson Frey†

April 2019

Abstract

The success of clientelism depends on the machine’s ability to deliver benefits that elicit voters’support while still keeping them impoverished. This requires targeted goods to be valuable, butrevocable. Exploring the flip side of this, this article explains why and how parties target voterswith valuable but irrevocable goods: delivering these anti-clientelism goods erodes the grasp ofopposing dominant machines. We formalize this logic in a probabilistic voting model, and empiri-cally assess it with previously untapped administrative data on a Brazilian program of distributionof cisterns, an archetypal irrevocable good, employing panel data and a regression discontinuitydesign. Results indicate that incumbents avoid their own strongholds and target the opposition’s,moreso in areas where these goods are more valuable to voters, and where machines are moredominant. These cisterns is turn are shown to erode the electoral advantage enjoyed by dominantmachines in the Brazilian semi-arid.

∗I would like to thank Alexander Lee, Gretchen Helmke, Jack Payne, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, and the participants at theComparative Politics Seminar at Rochester for comments and suggestions. All errors are my own.

†Department of Political Science, University of Rochester. Harkness Hall, 320B. Rochester, NY, 14627. email: ander-son.frey@rochester.edu.

Poverty fuels clientelism.1 This implies that political machines2 always face the following paradox:

they have to provide valuable benefits to voters while also keeping them vulnerable.3 Machines often

solve this problem by making clientelistic benefits revocable. Weitz-Shapiro (2014) argues that a ben-

efit is conducive to clientelism when it is “potentially ongoing - which increases its value and allows

for the development of over-time exchange - and yet easily revocable, so that the client fears losing

access to it.” Even though clientelism is not typically defined based on the “substance of what is dis-

tributed” (Weitz-Shapiro, 2014),4 the inherent revocability of goods matters when machines attempt

to maintain voters under persistent dependence. Irrevocable goods that generate ongoing value to

voters can undermine, as opposed to fuel future clientelistic exchanges, even with the political group

that provided the good. In this context, they become ‘anti-clientelism’ even when their distribution

is nonprogrammatic.

The present article examines the flip side of this paradox, exploring the strategic allocation of anti-

clientelism, irrevocable goods by states to local governments. Whereas studies of distributive politics

(Golden and Min, 2013) typically treat politically-motivated redistribution as an active attempt by

politicians to establish linkages with voters, our framework focuses on the allocation of goods that aim

to break, as opposed to build these ties. The intuition is simple: although these goods undermine the

ability of all parties to effectively do clientelism, they disproportionately erode the power of dominant

machines, and thus level the playing field of electoral competition.

Our theoretical framework is developed in the context of a probabilistic voting model, which em-

phasizes the following trade-off faced by parties when allocating irrevocable goods: targeting these

valuable goods to aligned local governments might generate electoral gains from credit claiming, but

at the same time their ‘income effect’ might jeopardize future attempts to engage in clientelism, and

trigger electoral losses for the party machine. The model offers a few predictions that are empirically

tested: (1) state incumbents benefit from targeting irrevocable goods to aligned local governments

only and only if their local political machine is weak, and the damage to the party’s clientelism efforts1The correlation between clientelism and vulnerability has been widely documented (Kitschelt and Wilkinson, 2008;

Boix and Stokes, 2009; Hicken, 2011; Nichter and Peress, 2017). Studies provide several explanations for this relationship:the poor benefit more from transfers (Dixit and Londregan, 1996), they do not rely on programmatic promises due to riskaversion (Kitschelt, 2000), or even that poverty is more conducive to the work of brokers (Stokes et al., 2013).

2We use the terms political machines and clientelistic parties interchangeably, as in Stokes (2005),which defines them aspolitical groups that “mobilize electoral support by trading particularistic benefits to voters in exchange for their votes.”

3Magaloni (2006) exemplifies this with Mexico’s hegemonic machine PRI, which was able to sustain political dominanceby “establishing policies that created a poverty trap for peasants”, the same peasants that were targeted by the party.

4See Stokes et al. (2013) for a detailed typology on clientelism.

1

do not surpass the credit claiming gains. When the political machine controlled by the local gov-

ernment is strong, state incumbents avoid their own strongholds, but direct these goods towards the

opposition’s; and (2) this strategy becomes more evident as irrevocable goods become more valuable,

or local machines more dominant.

We test these hypotheses using both panel data and a regression discontinuity (RD) design. Data

comes from a water cisterns program implemented in the Brazilian semi-arid, where cisterns repre-

sent the archetypal ‘anti-clientelism’ good. These 1,133 municipalities are among the poorest in the

country due to a combination of adverse weather, lack of infrastructure investment, and clientelistic

politics. In this context, the 16,000-liter, concrete-built cisterns support the household’s water con-

sumption needs during the dry season, and severely reduce its vulnerability.

We focus on how cisterns are allocated across municipalities by the parties that controlled state

governments in 2003-2012, using untapped administrative data for the program, and a combination

of panel regressions and a regression discontinuity (RD) design on close mayoral races.5 We asses the

local strength of the governor’s machine in every municipality-period based on two dimensions: the

party’s control over local budget resources, and the size of the party’s local network of brokers and

activists. Clientelism is only effective when machines have resources to allocate, and a network of

supporters to deliver them, canvass votes, and monitor loyalties. In the data, our measure of resource

availability for each municipality is binary: whether or not the current mayor belongs to the governor’s

party. We call this an ‘aligned’ mayor. In Brazil, mayors control the budget for the implementation

of most public policies in areas such as health, education, and infrastructure, and actively siphon

these resources to influence voters. What is more, they effectively play the role of brokers for party

candidates at the state and federal level (Brollo and Nannicini, 2012; Novaes, 2018), and are more

effective when they can mobilize an army of supporters (cabos eleitorais). The mayor’s network size

is measured by the share of party members in the municipality that are her copartisans.6 Figure 1

exemplifies this framework from the point of view of the governor’s party.

Both the panel regressions and the RD results provide three main insights. First, states heavily

target aligned municipalities when these control a weak local machine. The estimated ’alignment

effect’ is as large as 22% (more cisterns) for mayors with no machine power. This reflects the oppor-5State governments and NGOs played the most significant role in the program’s implementation. The federal govern-

ment was the main source of funding, but had little input on the allocation of resources and implementation.6Around 10% of Brazilian voters are formal party members, one of the highest rates in modern democracies.

2

tunity for credit claiming over the distribution of such valuable goods. Second, the alignment effect

falls quickly as the political machines controlled by mayors increase. A municipality governed by an

aligned mayor with a network size in the upper quintile receives 16% less cisterns than an unaligned

municipality where the mayor has a similar machine, and 27% less cisterns than one with an aligned

mayor with a weak machine. This suggests that the clientelism-reducing effect of these goods widely

surpasses potential credit claiming gains when mayors control a sizable clientelistic machine. Third,

both these effects are stronger in areas that receive less rain, i.e., where the anti-clientelism good is

more valuable to voters.

We also assess the effectiveness of this distribution strategy using the municipality-level election

results for state-wide legislative elections, focusing on the effects on the performance of the mayor’s

party at the local level. Again we use a combination of panel data regressions and RD, and focus

on the elections before (2002) and after (2014) our cisterns-distribution period. Overall, the results

suggest that 50-60% of the mayors in the sample are rendered ineffective party brokers in state-wide

elections by the distribution of cisterns.

Figure 1: Local Strengh of Clientelistic Machines from the State’s Perspective

As a robustness test for the mechanism, we examine the distribution of other discretionary budget

transfers form states to municipalities. These funds are not directly delivered to voters, but rather

controlled by mayors, and have been used to boost the electoral potential of local administrations

(Brollo and Nannicini, 2012).7 Not surprisingly, our results suggest that they are distributed mainly7Several other articles have documented the same distributive pattern around the world, see an example and a review

on Curto-Grau, Solé-Ollé, and Sorribas-Navarro (2018).

3

based on their potential for credit claiming gains by aligned mayors, with no evidence of the presence

of a clientelism-reducing income effect.

This article primarily connects with studies showing how irrevocable goods contribute to the ero-

sion of clientelism, by providing a framework for the strategic distribution of these goods. Closer to

the context described here, Bobonis et al. (2017) examine how an experimental distribution of cisterns

across 40 municipalities in Brazil reduces voter dependence on clientelism. In addition, Larreguy,

Marshall, and Trucco (2015) argue that an urban titling program in Mexico breaks the dependence

of voters on incumbents, in an environment where weak property rights are often used to enforce

clientelism. Both De La O (2015) and Frey (2017) show that the programmatic implementation of cash

transfers reduces the vulnerability of voters to vote buying and clientelism. The contrary is also true

for revocable benefits. Robinson and Verdier (2013) argue that public sector jobs are conducive to

clientelism, as they elicit voter commitment when private employment options are limited. The em-

pirical evidence on vote buying also shows that politicians target voters with revocable goods such as

small loans (Anderson, Francois, and Kotwal, 2015), or a continuous flow of small amounts of non-

durable staples as food (Magaloni, 2006); or medicine and other basic consumption goods (Nichter

and Peress, 2017).

We also directly speak to a central question in the clientelism literature (Hicken, 2011): what are

the mechanisms through which developing democracies transition out of the practice? Existing work

emphasizes how economic development raises the relative costs of this strategy to politicians, effec-

tively assuming that the transition requires at least some previous economic progress. For example,

Weitz-Shapiro (2012) argues that the existing middle-class disapproves of clientelistic distribution

and thus punish politicians for it; Stokes et al. (2013) argue that development undermines the work of

political brokers; and (Keefer, 2007) argues that clientelism has negative spillovers on the economy.

In this context, we show how the strategic actions of political parties contribute to the simultaneous

eradication of both economic underdevelopment and dominant clientelistic machines.

Finally, we contribute to the broad literature on distributive politics.8 Our logic differs from most

standard redistributive frameworks in two significant ways. First, existing work tends to focus on the

establishment rather than the breaking of politicin-voter ties. For example, targeting is used to ‘buy’

swing voters (Dixit and Londregan, 1996; Stokes, 2005); to mobilize turnout from core supporters (Cox8See a recent review in Golden and Min (2013)

4

and Mccubbins, 1986; Nichter, 2008; Larreguy, Marshall, and Querubín, 2016); to shape the electorate

(Hidalgo and Nichter, 2016); to signal commitment to further redistribution (Gottlieb et al., 2016); or

to help copartisan incumbents (Brollo and Nannicini, 2012).

Second, the heterogeneity in our distributive strategy comes from the variation in the strength of

the party’s clientelistic machine across locations. While most studies derive their allocation strategies

from differences in ideological preferences across regions,9 our framework is better fit for a context

where preferences for parties derive from the past flow of benefits received by voters. This follows the

broader clientelism literature suggesting “that many individuals have little in the way of ideological

preferences or reasons to vote, other than material rewards offered by clientelist parties” (Gans-Morse,

Mazzuca, and Nichter, 2014). In this context, our framework is also better suited to capture the relative

incentives for the distribution of anti- and pro-clientelism goods.

The remaining of the article is organized as follows. The next Section provides the necessary

political and institutional background on both the Brazilian semi-arid and the cisterns program. This

lays down the groundwork for the theoretical hypotheses and the empirical applications, which are

presented in the sequence. Our estimation include both a test of our proposed strategic allocation

framework, and also evidence that cisterns, in turn, have an impact on future electoral outcomes.

Water, Poverty and Politics in Brazil

We examine the distribution of irrevocable, anti-clientelism goods by state incumbents taking ad-

vantage of a program that has financed water cisterns in the Brazilian semi-arid since 2003. The re-

gion encompasses 1,131 municipalities in 9 states, with per capita GDP three times as low as the rest

of Brazil (Figure 2), and a population of nearly 24 million (12% of Brazil). The semi-arid is charac-

terized by well defined dry and wet seasons, low average rain,10 and high evaporation rate, which

makes it susceptible to severe droughts. The absence of sufficient infrastructure for water storage and

distribution further contributes to local households facing problems such as chronic poverty, mass

outmigration waves, famine, social unrest,11 and poor health (Rocha and Soares, 2015).9For example, the argument that the targeting of swing voters is more efficient assumes that ideological preferences are

‘fixed’ and orthogonal to past transfers from politicians (Dixit and Londregan, 1996; Stokes, 2005).10Average of 315-1285mm/year, in this sample.11See here two historical accounts of the consequences of droughts in the region (in Portuguese): http://goo.gl/mNcS9G

and http://goo.gl/ANFrQR.

5

Climate-driven vulnerability has also played role in supporting local clientelistic politics. For more

than a century the federal government has poured funds in the semi-arid in attempts to alleviate the

impact of droughts, but often these resources have been captured by local elites and used in clien-

telistic exchanges (Passador and Passador, 2010; Bastos and Miller, 2013; Campos, 2015). Many of

the existing water reservoirs where built in large private properties with limited access given to poor

households, serving only to further empower landowners in the political process.

Water distribution with tanker trucks has been one of the most common forms of clientelistic

exchange in the region. In the severe drought of 2012, the leftist federal government put tanker trucks

under the control of the armed forces, so as to minimize the political use of the resource.12 In the

state of Pernambuco, the government installed GPS devices to track the trucks’ routes. Also in 2012,

the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) investigated several accusations of vote buying with water,13 and

one large regional NGO (ASA) ran a campaign called ‘Don’t exchange your vote for water’, following

reports that voters were required to provide their registration number to collect the resource.14

While water remains an important part of voters’ demands to local politicians (Bobonis et al.,

2017), other forms of clientelistic exchanges have been well documented by recent research.15 Surveys

indicate that between 10% and 28% of voters in the country have experienced the practice, and that it

is more common in the Northeast states (Speck, 2003; Sugiyama and Hunter, 2013; Project, 2014; TSE,

2014). Additionally, between 2000 and 2009 nearly 700 elected politicians have been prosecuted and

ousted for vote buying.12http://goo.gl/WtHk1e.13http://goo.gl/FgwXFv.14http://goo.gl/v1s1WH.15See the following papers for research on clientelism in Brazil: Speck (2003); Sugiyama and Hunter (2013); Hidalgo and

Nichter (2016); Frey (2017); Nichter and Peress (2017).

6

Figure 2: 2012 per capita GDP in Brazil

The semi-arid region is on the right side chart. 2012 per capita GDP in US$.

Political Machines in Brazil

Despite the prevalence of clientelistic politics, the Brazilian context differs from other Latin Amer-

ican countries such as Argentina or Mexico16 due to the lack of a country-wide dominant machine.

There are multiple political machines operating in Brazil (Hidalgo, 2012),17 and they derive their

strength from (1) controlling public resources at the municipal level, and (2) being able to mobilize an

army of brokers and activists.

The main factor contributing for this power decentralization is the structure of public spending

in Brazil. Municipalities receive a large share of their budget in the form of transfers from the fed-

eral and state governments, and implement most relevant public policy in education, health, and

infrastructure. Incumbent mayors have ample control over this distribution (Ferraz and Finan, 2011),

which puts them in a disproportionately strong position to engage in clientelism, acting as local bro-

kers in favor of national political machines (Novaes, 2018). This is more relevant in regions of extreme

poverty generates where the demand for public resources significantly surpasses the supply, allowing16See Stokes (2005) for the case of Argentina, and Magaloni (2006) for Mexico.17Out of the ten largest political parties in Brazil, six achieved a high-clientelism score (at least 15 points out of 20) in The

Democratic Accountability Linkages Project (DALP) survey.

7

local incumbents to selectively provide access to goods and services that should be otherwise pub-

lic.18 Also, elections are candidate-driven and personalistic, with a relatively insignificant ideological

component (Ames and Smith, 2010; Klasnja and Titiunik, 2017; Novaes, 2018). In this environment,

clientelistic relationships tend to trump the appeal of programmatic policy promises and ideologies,

and poor voters rely heavily on relationships with local politicians and brokers to acquire goods and

favors in exchange for electoral support (Nichter and Peress, 2017).

As for the parties’ ability to mobilize brokers and activists, Brazil’s rate of party affiliation is now

around 10% of the voting population, one of the highest across democracies (Van Biezen, Mair, and

Poguntke, 2012; Speck, Braga, and Costa, 2015). This is an apparent paradox in a political environment

labeled as ‘party-averse’ (Samuels and Zucco, 2014), where voters rarely identify or even recognize

parties’ ideologies.19 The fact that parties significantly expand their ranks (only) in the year before

the municipal election suggests that recruitment is a show of strength by local aspirant politicians

within their patronage machines. Examining a survey of party members in Brazil, Speck, Braga, and

Costa (2015) show that a significant share of partisans joined primarily to support a local politician to

which network they belong, and less for ideology. This underscores the role of many party members

as political brokers (or cabos eleitorais) that fuel local political machines by delivering goods and favors,

canvassing support and monitoring the loyalty of voters (Stokes et al., 2013; Bobonis et al., 2017).

Figure 3 illustrates the importance of both local mayoral incumbency and partisan networks for the

success of parties in Brazil. The plot shows the performance in the 2002 legislative elections (congres-

sional) for pairs of parties with similar sizes of local partisan network, but different status of municipal

mayoral incumbency. When parties have few members, local incumbency does not differentiate the

parties’ vote shares. However, comparing parties with strong local networks, we see that holding

local incumbency boosts the party’s performance by more than 50% in these state-wide elections.

While the size of party membership rolls are relatively stable over time, local incumbency can

change discretely at every election cycle (four years). This produces a political environment where

different machines can operate in the same state, with their power depending on how those two factors

evolve over time.20 Figure 4 below shows the membership strength of the main parties in the semi-18Examples are private distribution of public resources in the form of goods such as gasoline, cement, medicine, and

water; or providing selective access to services as medical visits.19Partisans of PT, and to a lesser extent PSDB, constitute exceptions to this rule.20We emphasize that our framework here is not one of ‘dueling machines’, i.e., two different parties actively employing

strong clientelistic machines in the same municipality-period. We assume that only the party controlling the office of mayor

8

arid in 2002: DEM (old PFL), MDB (old PMDB) and PSDB were the strongest parties in the region,

followed closely by PROGRE (old PP, not shown). PT elected the President in 2002 and, despite being

a relatively weaker party throughout the region, it held the dominant network of supporters in a few

municipalities.

Figure 3: Mayoral Incumbency, Party Networks and Electoral Performance

The plot contains all municipalities in the semi-arid, and the vote shares of parties that held the office

of mayor in 2002. This produces the darker plot line. For every one of these observations, we found

a match among the parties that did not have the mayor, based on both similar local network size and

performance in the previous election (1998). This second group generates the lighter colored line. The

vote shares are for the state-wide elections for congress in 2002.

and a large partisan network has an active and strong machine in every municipality-period.

9

Figure 4: Largest Political Parties by Municipality

Municipalities in dark are the ones were the party holds the largest number of partisans.

10

Cisterns and Local Clientelism

Following a severe drought in the semi-arid in the late 90s, the recently elected leftist president

(Lula, PT, 2002) created the program ‘1 million cisterns’ to finance water tanks to poor households,

and reduce their exposure to weather volatility. The program was first conceived in a partnership

with the Articulação no Semi-Arido Brasileiro (ASA) which is an umbrella NGO that coordinates more

than 3,000 small regional organizations in the semi-arid.

Each cistern is concrete-built to hold 16,000 liters of water and support a family of six for up to

eight months.21 Once built, they are not easily removed or damaged.22 Although they primarily

collect rainfall, they can also be refilled manually. They have been shown to improve health, reduce

missing days at work and school, and significantly reduce time spent in search for water (Vaitsman

and Paes-Souza, 2007; Bobonis et al., 2017). More importantly, they also reduce the dependence of

voters on clientelistic exchanges with local politicians (Ruano and Baptista, 2011; Bobonis et al., 2017).

Due to the historical practice of distributing water in exchange for political support, the political

impact of this program was very salient in the semi-arid. For example, the NGO ASA used it to

spearhead a a campaign against vote buying during the 2012 elections.23 In addition, the Ministry of

Social Development conducted a survey to evaluate its cash transfer programs in 2005, and included

questions about the water supply of households (MDS, 2005). From the 212 rural households that

reported having either a cistern or a water tank as the main supplier of water, cistern owners were

84% more likely to declare that they do not trust local politicians than households that depend of

the trucks. This underscores how significant these goods are in breaking the dependence of these

households on local political machines.

The program is primarily financed with federal resources. Initially most cisterns were built in

partnerships with ASA, but as soon as states saw the opportunity to target voters, they increasingly

requested access to the resources. The progressive politicization of the program is shown in Figure

5, which shows the number of cisterns built by provider in 2003-2012. A typical program agreement

between the federal and the state government contracts a large amount of cisterns to be built in several21See a picture in Figure A.3, appendix.22In a severe drought, the cistern might not store enough water for irrigation of crops, but it is large enough to sustain the

consumption needs of the household.23http://goo.gl/nGPakT, in Portuguese. The NGO publicly states that cisterns play a significant role in breaking existing

clientelistic ties in the region. This is based on both the ASA’s website and our conversations with management.

11

different municipalities. While the federal governments only enters with the funding, states usually

implement the contract in partnerships with local NGOs,24 or with municipal governments directly,25

which allows them to allocate these goods across municipalities.

Figure 5: Number of Cisterns by Provider

In the 1,133 semi-arid municipalities.

Finally, there is also qualitative evidence that state governments care about the political conse-

quences of cisterns, and use them as tools to influence elections. When announcing new implemen-

tation agreements, Governors usually emphasize the role of cisterns in ‘emancipating’ or ‘liberating’

poor households from the bondage of poverty.26 In the state of Bahia, one traditional political ma-

chine (DEM) even presented a formal complain to the electoral courts saying the the state governor

(PT) illegally distributed cisterns during the electoral period. Quantitative evidence of the electoral

impact of these goods is shown starting in page 27.24See the cases of Sergipe (http://goo.gl/MNPVqa), Bahia (http://goo.gl/Vvr2qF, http://goo.gl/MwqEZT), Pernam-

buco (http://goo.gl/MSmyVK), or Ceara (http://goo.gl/vDosc6). All links contain documents in Portuguese.25See the example in Paraiba goo.gl/Bf31mt).26See statements from the states of Bahia (http://goo.gl/N5RX9h), and Ceara (http://goo.gl/vDosc6), in Portuguese.

12

Theoretical Framework

In this section, we derive our theoretical hypotheses with the help of a probabilistic voting model.

The model describes a context where mayors and their local networks of brokers are the main con-

duit of clientelistic exchanges with voters on behalf of politicians at higher levels of governments.

In a nutshell, the distribution of irrevocable goods affects voting behavior through two channels: it

creates an opportunity for credit claiming by incumbents, but also permanently reduces the vulner-

ability of voters, and their consequent demand for clientelistic exchanges. State incumbents benefit

from delivering irrevocable goods to aligned mayors as long as the credit claiming gains surpass the

losses infringed to the party’s local clientelistic machine. Thus, irrevocable goods are a more attrac-

tive in aligned municipalities if and only if the mayor controls a weak local machine. Otherwise, state

incumbents gain relatively more form delivering these goods to opposition strongholds.

Consider a state-wide election where the state incumbent party competes against the opposition

for shares of the total vote.27 The state party has a budget of 𝐺 irrevocable goods (cisterns) for redis-

tribution across 𝑀 municipalities. The probability that a voter in municipality 𝑚 receives a cistern is

given by 𝑔𝑚. The idiosyncratic voter preference for the opposition is denoted by 𝜉𝑖, and distributed

uniformly on the interval (−1/2𝜓, 1/2𝜓). Alignment between mayors and the state party is given by

𝑎𝑚 ∈ (0, 1). Given that cisterns impact elections through both credit-claiming and its anti-clientelism

effects, the relative utility received from the state party in municipality 𝑚 by voter 𝑖 is given by:

𝑢𝑖𝑚 = 𝑔𝛾𝑚(𝜂 + 𝛼(2𝑎𝑚 − 1)) + (1 − 𝑔𝛾

𝑚)(2𝑎𝑚 − 1)𝑐𝑚 − 𝜉𝑖 (1)

where 𝜂 indicates how much of the credit for cisterns is attributed to the state incumbent, and

𝛼 measures the share of the credit claimed by the incumbent mayor for her party.28 The size of the

clientelistic networks controlled by the mayor is denoted by 𝑐𝑚. Finally, 𝛾 measures the effectiveness

of cisterns in reducing the voter’s vulnerability. All voters for which this utility is positive vote for the

state incumbent party in the state-wide election. Accordingly, the state party maximizes its share of

votes 𝜋 in the state, which is given by:29

27This illustrates the state-wide legislative elections used in the empirical application.28Even though the state is financing these goods, the parameter 𝛼 is expected to be positive because either mayors are

involved in the distribution process or are able to claim ‘undeserved’ credit. Cruz and Schneider (2017) shows an exampleof this practice in the Philippines.

29State incumbents maximize the share of votes in the state, subject to the budget constraint. The maximization problem

13

𝜋 = 𝜓[𝑔𝛾𝑚(𝜂 + 𝛼(2𝑎𝑚 − 1)) + (1 − 𝑔𝛾

𝑚)(2𝑎𝑚 − 1)𝑐𝑚] + 12 (2)

The timing of events is as follows: (1) the state party distributes cisterns while observing the align-

ment of mayors, and the extension of their broker networks; (2) cisterns permanently increase the

consumption of voters; (3) preceding the next state-wide election, mayors use their local budget to

finance clientelistic exchanges through their patronage machine, and raise votes for their parties; and

(4) elections happens. The equilibrium condition for an interior solution is given below:

𝑔𝑚 = [𝜓𝛾𝜆 (𝜂 + (𝛼 − 𝑐𝑚)(2𝑎𝑚 − 1))]

( 11−𝛾 )

(3)

This condition allows us to derive the following predictions for the distribution of cisterns:

1. State incumbents favor voters in aligned (unaligned) municipalities when the mayor’s network

of brokers is weak (strong).

2. Differences between aligned and unaligned municipalities are magnified by the efficiency level

of cisterns, i.e., where cisterns are better at reducing the vulnerability of voters, this redistribu-

tion mechanism is more salient.

Notice that the trade-off between credit claiming and the clientelism-reducing effect of cisterns in

the voter’s decision is given by (𝛼−𝑐𝑚)(2𝑎𝑚−1). The first prediction is better illustrated if we consider

the main quantity of interest in this exercise, which is the ratio of probabilities of receiving cisterns in

aligned and unaligned municipalities, as shown below:

𝑔𝑎𝑔𝑢

= [𝜂 + (𝛼 − 𝑐𝑚)𝜂 − (𝛼 − 𝑐𝑚)]

( 11−𝛾 )

(4)

First, consider the case where both mayors have a weak local clientelistic machine, and 𝛼 > 𝑐𝑚.

In this case, the credit claiming gains are more important than the potential anti-clientelism losses

generated by the distribution of cisterns, and voters in an aligned municipality should receive rela-

tively more cisterns. It is easy to see that the term inside the brackets is higher than one, so 𝑔𝑎/𝑔𝑢 > 1.

Similarly, when 𝛼 < 𝑐𝑚, both mayors have a strong local clientelistic machine, and cisterns are not at-

is setup as the following Lagrangian: max𝑔 𝜋 − 𝜆 ∑𝑀𝑚 𝑔𝑚

14

tractive for aligned municipalities. State incumbents will avoid hurting their clientelistic strongholds,

while aiming to destabilize their opposition’s by giving them more cisterns (𝑔𝑎/𝑔𝑢 < 1).

Now consider the efficiency of cisterns. The weight in the voter’s decision of the trade-off above is

given by 𝛾. When cisterns are more effective in generating income and reducing vulnerability (high

𝛾), the impact of trade-off between credit claiming and the clientelism-reducing effect is magnified,30

and so is the redistribution mechanism. This dynamic is illustrated by Figure 6 below, which shows

how the ratio of cisterns in aligned and unaligned municipalities changes for different values of 𝑐𝑚

(x-axis) and 𝑔𝑎𝑚𝑚𝑎 (different curves).

Figure 6: Theoretical Predictions

Simulation generated for the following parameter values: 𝜂 = 0.9 and 𝛼 = 0.1.

Testing the Hypotheses

We test these hypotheses using municipality-level data on the number of cisterns delivered by

States in the Brazilian semi-arid, between 2003 and 2012.31 Brazil’s electoral calendar determines that30It is easy to see that when the term in brackets is higher (lower) than one, the ratio 𝑔𝑎/𝑔𝑢 increases (decreases) with

𝑔𝑎𝑚𝑚𝑎. See the formal proof in the appendix.31This data was provided by the Ministry of Social Development (MDS) for the period.

15

gubernatorial and municipal elections always happen in two-year intervals (Figure 7). Thus, every

municipality has a potentially new alignment between mayor and state incumbent every two years.

We code alignment with a dummy that assumes value 1 when these parties coincide in any given

2-year period. Election results were obtained from the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE), and include

all five state-level elections in 1998-2002-2006-2010-2014 (state governor, state chamber and federal

chamber), and all four municipal elections in 2000-2004-2008-2012 (mayor).32 We estimate the mech-

anism of cisterns distribution using the five 2-year periods between 2003 and 2012. The state-level

elections pre- and post-cisterns (2002 and 2014) were mainly used to evaluate the subsequent impact

of cisterns on electoral outcomes.

Figure 7: Timeline of Events

Timing of state and municipal elections in the sample.

For any party, the strength of its local machine depends on the extension of its membership rolls,

and on having the mayoral incumbency. We measure party membership in each municipality in 2000

(i.e. pre-cisterns) as the time-invariant proxy of local network strength.33 Party members were roughly

5% of the voting population in the semi-arid in the period. Figure 4 in page 10 shows a map with the

partisan strength of the three larger parties in the sample (MDB, PSDB and DEM), and PT. Due to the

presence of outliers, we estimate our effects with both the variable and its log-transformation.34 The

results are robust to this transformation.32Municipal elections happen in one round in all but one municipality in the semi-arid. This municipality is excluded

from the sample (Vitória da Conquista, BA). If a municipality had the results of their municipal election contested by thecourts, and a new unscheduled election is called, the municipality is excluded from the sample for that specific period, asthe alignment status is uncertain during the 2 years. Finally, we only include periods in which the municipal election hadmore than one candidate (97% of total). None of these changes alter the main findings.

33Defined as the share of the population that belongs to the party. Membership rolls are provided by TSE.34log(1+var).

16

Cisterns are the proxy for irrevocable, anti-clientelism goods. The outcome variable is coded as

the number of cisterns delivered per 100 households in a municipality, in each two-year period. On

average, states build 1 cistern per 100 households per municipality each period. We also provide a

placebo test for the mechanism using the allocation of discretionary transfers by states across mu-

nicipalities. This variable is coded as the amount of discretionary resources as a percentage of total

budget, obtained from the FINBRA database.35 Finally, the value of cisterns to voters in each mu-

nicipality is based on weather patterns.36 The intuition is that cisterns should be more effective in

locations that are suffering from a more severe dry season. The construction of each relevant variable

is described in the footnotes of Table 1.

Table 1: Description of the Main Variables

Variable Mean SE Median Min. Max

State cisterns 1.018 2.510 0.000 0.000 36.974Discretionary transfers 1.550 2.187 0.826 -1.896 28.672Average LT precipitation 67.320 14.846 66.258 31.516 128.510Recent precipitation 64.476 17.822 62.721 19.517 142.579Rural share of population 0.508 0.187 0.514 0.006 0.927Mayor aligned 0.174 0.380 0.000 0.000 1.000Mayor’s partisanship 0.948 1.346 0.586 0.000 20.091PT 0.052 0.222 0.000 0.000 1.000PSB 0.078 0.269 0.000 0.000 1.000MDB 0.175 0.380 0.000 0.000 1.000PSDB 0.135 0.342 0.000 0.000 1.000DEM 0.181 0.385 0.000 0.000 1.000

The variables are defined as follows: (1) State cisterns: cisterns distributed by States in a 2-year period, per 100 house-holds; (2) Discretionary Transfers: Percentage of budget coming from discretionary state transfers. This variable isonly available for a subset of 61% of the main sample. (3) Average LT precipitation: in cm per year, 1971-1995; (4)Recent precipitation: in cm per 2-year period; (5) Rural share: share of rural population in 2000; (6) Mayor alignedshare of mayors elected in the same party as the current governor; (7) Mayor’s partisanship share of population thatbelongs to the mayor’s party, fixed in 2000; (8-12) Mayor Party share of elected mayors in the given party.

35This data is only available for a subsample of 61% of the municipalities.36Weather data comes from the climate unit in the University of East Anglia, which provides monthly rain data for the pe-

riod 1971-2012, for a grid of 0.5 degrees in latitude and longitude. Rain levels for each municipality are estimated matchinggrids with the coordinates of the city center.

17

Empirical Strategy

We first estimate the effects of party alignment and local machine size on the distribution of cisterns

using equation 5 below.

𝑦𝑖𝑡 = 𝛽0 + 𝛽1𝑎𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽2𝑐𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽3(𝑎𝑖𝑡 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡) + 𝜓𝑖 + 𝜃𝑡 + 𝜖𝑖𝑡 (5)

where 𝑦𝑖𝑡 denotes the amount of cisterns per 100 households distributed to municipality 𝑖 in period 𝑡.

The size of the mayor’s party membership is given by 𝑐𝑖𝑡, and alignment is given by 𝑎𝑖𝑡. Municipality

and time effects are given by 𝜓𝑖 and 𝜃𝑡, respectively.37 Table 2 below provides a framework to interpret

the coefficients in light of the main theoretical prediction.

Table 2: Estimated Coefficients and Expected Distribution of Cisterns

𝑎𝑖𝑡 = 0 𝑎𝑖𝑡 = 1 Difference

𝑐𝑖𝑡 = 0 𝛽0 𝛽1 + 𝛽0 𝛽1

𝑐𝑖𝑡 > 0 𝛽0 + 𝛽2 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡 𝛽0 + 𝛽1 + (𝛽2 + 𝛽3) × 𝑐𝑖𝑡 𝛽1 + 𝛽3 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡

Difference 𝛽2 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡 (𝛽2 + 𝛽3) × 𝑐𝑖𝑡 𝛽3 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡

The baseline level of cisterns is given by 𝛽0, in the case where an unaligned mayor controls a weak

local machine. The coefficient 𝛽1 captures the marginal effect of alignment on the distribution of

cisterns, precisely when 𝑐𝑖𝑡 = 0 (the mayor’s machine is at its weakest). This coefficient estimates the

pure credit claiming effects in the distribution of cisterns, and according to the theory, more cisterns

are given to aligned mayors in this case (𝛽1 > 0).

We are however more interested on how this marginal effect changes as the size of the mayor’s ma-

chine increases. Our model predicts that the effect of alignment should decrease and, if the clientelism-

reducing feature of cisterns is strong enough, it should become significantly negative. This change

in effect given by 𝛽1 + 𝛽3 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡. These coefficients measure a combination of the pure credit claiming

effects and the clientelism-reducing feature of cisterns, while 𝛽3 alone measures the pure clientelism-

reducing effect at any given 𝑐𝑖𝑡. Accordingly, our model predicts 𝛽3 < 0, and for high enough values37We also include the contemporaneous level of precipitation as a control, calculated as the rain in the two-year period

divided by the long-term average.

18

of 𝑐𝑖𝑡, also 𝛽1 + 𝛽3 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡 < 0.

The empirical strategy also allows us to observe how the clientelism-reducing feature of cisterns

affects aligned and unaligned municipalities separately, without credit claiming effects. This is re-

flected in the coefficients in the last row of Table 2 (difference). In locations with unaligned mayors,

state incumbents are expected to deliver more cisterns as the size of the mayor’s machine increases, in

order to undermine the local clientelistic efforts. This is captured by 𝛽2 > 0. In aligned municipalities,

strong-machine mayors are expected to receive less cisterns, as state incumbents avoid hurting their

own strongholds, so the prediction is that 𝛽2 + 𝛽3 < 0. Again, the difference between those terms is

𝛽3, which aggregates the pure clientelism-reduction effect of cisters,

The results obtained with this analysis are presented on Table 3. Column (1) shows a simple

regression without including the variable 𝑐𝑖𝑡, columns (2) through (4) show the full specification.

Table 3: Distribution of Cisterns by State Governments

Dependent Variable: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Intercept 3.423** 3.324** 3.373** 3.325**(0.059) (0.135) (0.162) (0.096)

Aligned (a) 0.031 0.732** 0.703** 0.418**(0.137) (0.258) (0.289) (0.212)

Membership (b) 0.209 0.076 0.102(0.179) (0.224) (0.062)

Aligned * Membership (c) -1.477** -1.468** -0.519**(0.391) (0.485) (0.197)

(b) + (c) -1.268** -1.392** -0.417**(0.383) (0.465) (0.196)

Observations 5371 5371 3259 5371

*p<0.1, **p<0.05. Standard errors are clustered by municipality and presented in parenthesis. All re-gressions include fixed effects for time and municipality, and control for contemporaneous rain level.Columns (2) and (3) uses the log-linear variable for 𝑐𝑖𝑡, column (4) uses the linear version. Column (3) hasa reduced sample to match only municipalities that provide also information on their budget expensesduring the entire period.

Panel Data Results and Discussion

The baseline indicates that a municipality with an opposition mayor that controls a weak political

machine receives on average 3.3 cisterns per 100 households every period (column 2). In line with

19

the hypothesis, aligned mayors receive an additional 0.7 cisterns/100h on top of the baseline (a 22%

increase). This result is robust and significant across specifications, and suggests that the distribution

of cisterns generate credit claiming effects by mayors.

The clientelism-reducing effect of cisterns also drives how state incumbents allocate these goods.

The coefficient in line (b) corresponds to 𝛽2 in the empirical model, and shows how the distribution

changes with machine size for the group of unaligned mayors. The coefficient has a positive signal

as predicted, albeit with low statistical power. On the other hand, the effect observed for the group

of aligned mayors is strong, and statistically significant under all specifications. The line (b)+(c) cor-

responds to 𝛽2 + 𝛽3. The estimate here indicates how many less cisterns a household receives in an

aligned municipality as the mayor’s political machine increases. This effect is again negative, strong,

and statistically significant across specifications. For example, for the group of aligned mayors, the

ones with a political machine at the upper quintile (𝑐𝑖𝑡 = 0.87) receive -1.1 less cisterns/100h than an

aligned municipality where 𝑐𝑖𝑡 = 0, a 27% reduction.

The combination of both these results suggest that the clientelism-reduction mechanism is more

relevant for the group of aligned mayors. In other words, state incumbents are more effective at shield-

ing their own strongholds from the threat of irrevocable goods, than they are at actively undermining

their opposition’s with more cisterns. One possible explanation for this fact is that many of the agree-

ments for the distribution of cisterns require the active engagement of mayors in the logistical process

(see page 11). Opposition mayors that control a local strong machine might be more resistant to the

arrival of these goods in their localities, strategically reducing the state’s ability to implement these

programs and undermine their clientelistic exchanges.

Figure 10 shows how the marginal effect of alignment changes as 𝑐𝑖𝑡 increases. Following Brambor,

Clark, and Golder (2006), the plot shows how the effect measured by 𝛽1 + 𝛽3 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡 evolves along the

size of the mayor’s political machine. The bars in the bottom show the density of the sample along the

same dimension. We see that in line with the theory, for approximately the first third of the sample,

the effect of alignment remains positive. This reflects the credit claiming gains from delivering cisterns

to aligned mayors. The coefficient declines steadily as the income effect of cisterns become relevant.

For the last third of the sample, we observe a statistically significant negative effect, which indicates

that the clientelism-reducing mechanism widely surpasses the credit claiming effects. For example,

an aligned municipality at the upper quintile of machine level (𝑐𝑖𝑡 = 0.87) receives 2.9 cisterns/100h,

20

11% less than the baseline, 16% less than an unaligned municipality where the mayor has a similar

machine, and 27% less than an aligned mayor with no machine.

This effect measured by 𝛽1 + 𝛽3 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡 still reflects a combination of the two impacts of irrevocable

goods: credit claiming, and the income effect. Because credit claiming is positive (𝛽1), the net income

effect of cisterns is given by 𝛽3 ×𝑐𝑐𝑖𝑡, for every machine size. For example, for the same upper quintile,

the net clientelism-reducing effect along is implies a reduction of 1.3 cisterns/100h, which represents

a 40% reduction from the baseline.

Figure 8: Effect of Alignment for Different Machine Sizes

Confidence intervals at 95%. The bars show the density of the sample. For the purpose of presentation,

the plot does not show values above 2 in the x-axis, 1% of the sample.

Heterogeneity to weather patterns as evidence of the mechanism

Hypothesis 2 in our model predicts that our proposed allocation framework is stronger in areas

where cisterns are more valuable to households. Its test is shown in Table 4. The Table presents the

estimates obtained with equation 5, but also interacting all the relevant coefficients with a dummy that

indicates whether the municipality had above-median precipitation during each 2-year period.38 The38The precipitation for each municipality-period is normalized by the long-term average for that specific location.

21

exercise here relies on the assumption that recent deviations in weather are salient to both politicians

and voters, and shape their expectations on the effectiveness of cisterns as vulnerability-reducing

goods. In other words, recent precipitation patterns serve as a proxy for 𝛾 in our model.

The results show that the group that experienced drier weather also shows much stronger evidence

that cisterns are distributed based their clientelistic-reducing motivation. For this group, both 𝛽3 and

𝛽3 + 𝛽2 are negative, strong in magnitude, and statistically significant. Consider for example, the

pure anti-clientelism effect of cisterns that lead state incumbents to avoid their strongholds, which is

measured by coefficient in line (b)+(c). It suggests that an aligned municipality in the upper quintile

of machine size (𝑐𝑖𝑡 = 0.87) receives 39% less cisterns than an aligned municiplaity with (𝑐𝑖𝑡 = 0). This

effect is much lower for the high-rain sample, a 8% reduction, and the coefficient 𝛽3 + 𝛽2 is also not

statistically significant for this subsample.

Table 4: Heterogeneity in the Distribution of Cisterns

Low Rain High Rain Difference

(1) (2) (3)

Intercept 3.389** 6.778** 3.389**(0.162) (0.324) (0.162)

Aligned (a) 1.133** 0.399* -0.734(0.472) (0.206) (0.500)

Membership (b) 0.105 0.307 0.202(0.219) (0.198) (0.214)

Aligned * Membership (c) -2.138** -0.974** 1.164*(0.626) (0.375) (0.673)

(b) + (c) -2.033** -0.667* 1.366**(0.593) (0.355) (0.609)

Observations 5371 5371 5371

*p<0.1, **p<0.05. Standard errors are clustered by municipality and presented in parenthesis. All re-gressions include fixed effects for time and municipality. These results from a pooled regression with aninteraction term for high rain.

Regression Discontinuity Results

The estimates in this article have explored so far the variation across municipalities in both the

party alignment, and the extension of the mayor’s political machine. The previous empirical specifi-

22

cation uses fixed effects for both municipality and time to account for any confounders that are either

period-specific and constant across municipalities, or municipality-specific and fixed over time. Thus,

this identification strategy is still vulnerable to potential confounders that are time-location specific,

i.e., unobserved shocks that are correlated with the distribution of cisterns, and are unique to some

municipalities and time periods. We show that our results are robust to this potential confounding by

also employing a regression discontinuity (RD) to test the main theoretical hypotheses. The RD de-

sign compares municipalities where a mayoral candidate from the state party barely won the election

(treatment group – aligned), to municipalities where she barely lost (control group – opposition). 39

This empirical strategy gives a quasi-random assignment of party alignment to municipalities

(Lee, 2008), and the coefficients are identified for a hypothetical location where the margin of victory

in the last mayoral election was zero (𝑚𝑣𝑖𝑡 = 0). Although the RD’s identification assumptions limit

the researcher’s ability to extrapolate the results for observations away from this threshold (i.e. the RD

coefficients have low external validity), the design is extremely robust to the influence of unobserved

variable confounding, i.e., it has ‘strong internal validity’ (de la Cuesta and Imai, 2016).40

The RD design provides quasi-random variation on local incumbency across aligned and un-

aligned mayors, therefore identifying the causal effects of alignment. We focus on how this effect

changes for two different groups: one where all elected mayors control a strong political machine

(party membership above median), and one where mayors control a weak machine. The estimation

of such effects can be achieved by fitting a local linear regression on each side of the discontinuity for

both subsamples, as shown in equation 6.

𝑦𝑖𝑡 =1

∑𝑗=0

[𝛽0𝑗 + 𝛽1𝑗𝑎𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽2𝑗𝑐50𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽3𝑗(𝑎𝑖𝑡 × 𝑐50𝑖𝑡)] × 𝑀𝑈𝐿𝑇𝑗 + 𝜖𝑖𝑡 (6)

where 𝑀𝑈𝐿𝑇𝑗 = (1, 𝑚𝑣𝑖𝑡), mayor alignment is given by 𝑎𝑖𝑡, and 𝑐50𝑖𝑡 is a dummy that assumes value

one when the mayor’s party has local membership above the median, and zero otherwise.39This comparison can only be made for a subgroup of municipalities where at least one of the two main mayoral candi-

dates was from the state party, and the vote difference between the top two candidates was small. The strategy employedhere is close to the one in Brollo and Nannicini (2012), where the authors also compare aligned and unaligned mayoral can-didates, defining alignment as having the same party as the federal government. Other examples of a similar identificationstrategy for the case of Brazil can be found in Boas and Hidalgo (2011); Ferraz and Finan (2011); Klasnja and Titiunik (2017).

40In other words, the assumptions required to identify the coefficients of interest are less stringent than many other em-pirical designs.

23

Results The direction of the RD coefficients largely match those obtained with the panel analysis,

with minor differences in the statistical power of the estimates due to the different sample. Figure 9

illustrates the estimation results. For every one of the four plots in the figure, the right side represents

municipalities with aligned mayors (treatment group). Table 5 shows the estimated coefficients for

different bandwidths. The remaining tables and plots containing the usual validity checks for the RD

design are included in the online appendix.41

Figure 9: RDD: Distribution of State Resources

Aligned municipalities are always in the right side of every plot. Weak (Strong) machine is defined as the

mayor’s party having the share of partisanship below (above) the median in a certain municipality. Points

represent the average of the outcome variables for every bin. The line represents the linear fit.

The left-side plot shows that aligned mayors receive slightly more cisterns than opposition mayors

when both machines are relatively weak. This result is in line with both the credit claiming hypothesis

and our panel data findings, even though the coefficient is only significant at a 90% confidence level

here (see Table 5, line (a)). Because we are measuring machine strength discretely here, this coefficient

should also capture some of the income effect of cisterns in addition to credit claiming, which might41They include the McCrary test, the balance of covariates around the discontinuity, and the results for different polyno-

mial specifications an including covariates.

24

explain the imprecision in the estimate.42

The right-side plot better underscores the mechanism in place. It shows that aligned mayors re-

ceive less cisterns than unaligned ones when both machines are strong. The effect can be seen in line

(a)+(c) of Table 5, and it is statistically significant and stable in magnitude across bandwidths and

specifications (Table 5, and the appendix). We emphasize that this effect is actually a combination

of credit claiming considerations, and the clientelism-reducing features of cisterns. Because credit

claiming is positive (as shown by the model and previous results), this suggests that the net income

effect of cisterns is strong and negative.

Table 5: Distribution of Cisterns by State Governments (RDD)

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Aligned (a) 0.737* 0.743 1.094 1.360(0.408) (0.677) (0.923) (1.150)

Membership (b) 0.688* 0.600 0.519 0.415(0.401) (0.590) (0.723) (0.892)

Aligned * Membership (c) -1.541** -1.987** -2.282** -2.404*(0.557) (0.869) (1.138) (1.420)

(a) + (c) -0.804** -1.244** -1.188* -1.044(0.379) (0.544) (0.664) (0.834)

Bandwidth 14.24 7.12 4.75 3.56Observations 1114 618 426 309

*p<0.1, **p<0.05. Standard errors are heteroskedascity robust and presented in parenthesis. Column (1)has the optimal bandwidth, calculated based on Calonico, Cattaneo, and Titiunik (2014). Columns (2),(3) and (4) present the results for the optimal bandwidth divided by 2, 3 and 4, respectively.

State discretionary transfers and the mechanism

In this section we use other discretionary transfers from state incumbents to municipalities as

a placebo test for our mechanism. Brazil’s federalism leads municipalities to rely heavily on trans-

fers from higher administrative levels to meet their budget needs. Most of the government policies

implemented locally have their funding centralized by the federal government. This is the case the

cash transfers program (Frey, 2017), budget amendments by members of congress (Firpo, Ponczek,42In other words, some mayors in this sample might have machine size close to the median value, and should be subject

to the clientelism-reducing effects, which would reduce the estimated coefficient.

25

and Sanfelice, 2015), other discretionary transfers (Brollo and Nannicini, 2012), and also the cisterns

discussed here. States still provide around 14% of municipal revenues, but most of these resources

have their distribution based on pre-determined methodologies that allow for little manipulations by

incumbents.

In this context, the FINBRA database provides one of the few opportunities to observe other dis-

cretionary allocation of resources by state incumbents across municipalities. Like the federal govern-

ment, states sign agreements (convênios) for transferring funds to specific projects in municipalities.

These transfers are truly discretionary, and represent around 1.5% of municipal revenues. Brollo and

Nannicini (2012) has shown that similar federal transfers are an important tool in the hands of incum-

bents to influence the local electorate in their favor. This is not surprising, as local political machines

benefit from public resources by siphoning cash; or goods such as gasoline, cement, medication; or

even exclusive access to services like hospital beds, all in order to raise electoral support.43 A survey

shows that around two-thirds of vote buying offers in Brazil come in the form of an administrative

good or services (Speck, 2003).

Given the local political context of clientelism in the semi-arid, and the fact that these discretionary

state transfers are always manipulated by the mayors before any of the resources reaches the voters,

they cannot be considered anti-clientelism. In fact, the above evidence suggests that they fuel local

political machines, and that local incumbents have ways of making them revocable to voters. In this

case, these goods should be distributed under a different framework than the one proposed in this

article. While the credit claiming effects should also lead states to favor aligned mayors, contrary to

cisterns, this alignment effect should be higher as the mayor’s network of brokers increases.

Figure 10 shows how the marginal effect of alignment varies across machines size, now for these

state transfers (𝛽1 + 𝛽3 × 𝑐𝑖𝑡, as before).44 The plot shows that both the point estimate and the slope of

the coefficient are positive, in stark contrast to the negative trend observed for cisterns. This suggests

that state incumbents gain from targeting these resources heavily to their own strongholds, due to a

combination of credit claiming and clientelistic strength. Even though this result is not surprising,45

it is useful here to underscore the contrast with the distrbutional stratgey for irrevocable goods.43See examples in Nichter and Peress (2017).44Table A.2 in the appendix shows the estimated coefficients for equation 5.45Favoritism for aligned politicians has been shown by Brollo and Nannicini (2012); Curto-Grau, Solé-Ollé, and Sorribas-

Navarro (2018), for example.

26

Figure 10: Effect of Alignment for Different Machine Sizes

Confidence intervals at 95%. The bars show the density of the sample. For the purpose of presentation, the

plot does not show values above 2 in the x-axis, 1% of the sample.

Electoral Consequences of State Cisterns

In this section we attempt to bring our argument full circle by showing how cisterns implemented

by states undermine the political power of local dominant machines. The main challenge in this anal-

ysis comes from the fact that cisterns are not randomly, but strategically distributed to municipalities,

which could generate bias if we use data from the same period in the exercise.46 Although we do not

have a random source of variation for the distribution of cisterns, we use instead two different ap-

proaches to mitigate selection bias and estimate the electoral effects of cisterns. None of the method-

ologies is foolproof in this context, but the fact that they both rely on different assumptions and yet

generate very similar results increases our confidence in the effectiveness of cisterns in reducing local

clientelism in the semi-arid.

All throughout this analysis, we focus on the performance of the mayor’s party in the state-wide46For example, A regression that attempts to identify the effect of cisterns on vote shares during the period 2003-2012

would be biased if vote shares are also directly affected by the alignment status of the mayor.

27

elections for congress. Novaes (2018) has shown that mayors are the most important link in the clien-

telistic chain connecting state candidates and local voters, through the use of local budget resources.

This is also shown by Figure 3. Accordingly, we focus on the results of the 2014 congressional election,

which is out-of-sample, given that our cistern distribution data ends in 2012. Congressional elections

are state-wide, and voters pick one candidate from an open list. Several candidates run for every

party, and occupy the seats according to their within-party ranking determined by their individual

votes.47

Method 1: 2014 vs. 2000 Comparison Here we attempt to compare the 2014 election with the last

congressional election before the program of cisterns started, in 2002. For every municipality 𝑚, we

measure the share of votes for the mayor’s party in both periods (𝑡 ∈ (2002, 2014), denoted by 𝑝𝑐𝑡𝑚𝑡.

We also measure the aggregate number of cisterns given by states in the entire 2003-2012 period, given

by 𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑡. Finally, 𝑐𝑚𝑡 denotes the size of the mayor’s local political machine, defined as before. We esti-

mate the equation below using only within-municipality, within-party, and within-election variation,

in order to mitigate bias coming from time-invariant municipality characteristics, party specific elec-

toral strength, and time trends in vote shares.

𝑝𝑐𝑡𝑚𝑡 = 𝜏0 + 𝜏1𝑐𝑚𝑡 + 𝜏2𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑡 + 𝜏3(𝑐𝑚𝑡 × 𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑡) + 𝜂𝑡 + 𝜃𝑚 + 𝜇𝑚𝑡 (7)

The results are shown in Table 6. The first two columns define 𝑐𝑖𝑡 as a continuous variable, and

the last two columns define machine size as a dummy (above and below median machine size) to

facilitate the presentation of results. The estimates are similar under both specifications, and clearly

show that mayors heavily rely on the strength of their local political machine to broker votes for their

congressional candidates (𝜏1 in line (a)). The coefficients are consistently positive and statistically

significant in line (a). Columns (3) suggests that a mayor with above-median machine strength has a

4.8 percentage points increase vote shares with compared to a weak-machine mayor (a 44% increase).

However, this effect comes entirely from locations with less cisterns. As the stock of cisterns in

municipalities increase, the line (b)+(c) indicates that the vote shares of the mayor’s party are signifi-

cantly reduced. The change in the machine-size effect along the number of cisterns in shown clearly47Legislative elections are a better fit for the current analysis than the gubernatorial race. While only a few parties present

candidates for government, all parties run legislative candidates.

28

in Figure 11 below. This positive relationship between machine strength and the mayor’s ability to

broker votes in only significant for around 40% of the sample, with the lower number of cisterns, and

the point estimates become negative for the last third of the sample.

Table 6: Votes for the Mayor’s Party: 2014 and 2002

Dependent Variable: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Membership (a) 6.025** 8.094** 4.805** 5.932**(2.209) (2.349) (1.515) (1.681)

Cisterns (b) -0.307 -0.416(1.135) (1.201)

Membership * Cisterns (c) -3.655** -2.438*(1.390) (1.395)

(b) + (c) -3.962** -2.854**(1.330) (1.256)

Observations 2114 2114 2114 2114

*p<0.1, **p<0.05. Standard errors are clustered by municipality and presented in parenthesis. All regressionsinclude fixed effects for time, party and municipality, and control for the alignment status of the mayor in2014 and 2000. Columns (1) and (2) uses a continuous variable for 𝑐𝑖𝑡, the others use a dummy that assumesvalue 𝑐𝑖𝑡 = 1 when the mayor’s machine strength is above the median value for that period.

29

Figure 11: Effect of Machine Strength for Different Stock of Cisterns

Confidence intervals at 95%. The bars show the density of the sample. For the purpose of presentation, the

plot does not show values above 2 in the x-axis, 2% of the sample.

Method 2: 2014 Cross Section with a RDD Here we use a regression discontinuity design to com-

pare the votes of parties that elected the mayor 2 years before the 2014 election, to the votes of parties

of the runner-up in close mayoral races. We have argued before that electing the mayor gives parties

an upper hand in brokering local votes for state-wide elections. With teh RDD we achieve a quasi-

random assignment of mayorship, and consequently, a quasi-random assignment of the parties’ abil-

ities to broker votes in each municipality.

The results are shown in Figure 12, where we estimate the effects of mayorship for four different

subsamples: (1) cities that received less cisterns, and the mayor’s machine is weak (top-left); (2) cities

that received more cisterns, and the mayor’s machine is weak (top-right); (3) cities with less cisterns,

and the mayor’s machine is weak (bottom-left); and (4) cities with more cisterns, and the mayor’s

machine is strong (bottom-right). If mayor’s that control a sizable local political network are better at

brokering votes for their parties, we should only see positive effects in the bottom plots. However, if

cisterns can effectively undermine the mayor’s brokerage ability, than we should actually only observe

30

effects for the bottom-left plot, where string mayors are less affected by the clientelism-reducing effects

of cisterns. Accordingly, this is exactly the pattern shown by the data here. Only in low-cistern, strong-

machine environments we see any effects of brokerage, as mayors raise 8.2% more votes for their

parties than the runner-up in the last mayoral election.

Figure 12: RDD: Distribution of State Resources

The party of the mayor is always in the right side of every plot, the left side has the votes for the party of the

runner-up. Weak (Strong) machine is defined as the mayor’s party having the share of partisanship below

(above) the median. The stock of cisterns is also split at the median. Points represent the average of the

outcome variables for every bin. The line represents the linear fit.

31

Conclusion

This article examines the logic of strategic allocation of irrevocable goods by incumbents, focusing

on how politicians use them to loosen the grasp of opposing dominant parties on voters. We test our

hypotheses with the distribution of water cisterns by state governments across municipalities in the

Brazilian semi-arid. Our results show that states target more cisterns to opposition strongholds, while

avoiding areas where they control the dominant machine. This mechanism is much stronger in areas

where cisterns are more valuable to voters, and also where parties are more dominant.

These results point to an alternative path out of clientelism for developing democracies. One

that does not necessarily depend on significant leaps in economic development, happening through

the strategic actions of political agents. Given that most dominant clientelistic machines were often

established as a result of a continuous, long-lasting relationship between patrons and clients (Kitschelt

and Wilkinson, 2008), many nondominant parties in the developing world could never replicate the

machine infra-structure needed to make them competitive against traditional dominant parties. In this

context, implementing policies that undermine clientelism ‘for all’ is the optimal strategy. We believe

that such strategic considerations contributed to the demise of traditional regional machines in the

Brazilian Northeast in the past two decades, especially since this demise cannot be solely attributed

to the recent advances in economic development, as the region remains extremely poor.

By the same logic, this article also sheds light on the added motivation that incumbent parties face

when implementing certain types of universal poverty alleviation programs in developing democra-

cies. In many of these countries, nondominant parties are more likely to control the federal govern-

ment before they ever win significant victories in smaller, rural localities, which are more susceptible

to clientelistic machines (e.g. PAN in Mexico, 2000; PT in Brazil, 2002). Knowing that irrevocable

benefits would have the power to level the playing field in these areas, increases the likelihood that

these parties would fund and support such policies. In the case of Brazil, the allocation of cisterns by

states was only made possible by the funding provided by the left-wing PT presidency. Even though

PT also had a powerful local machine in some municipalities in the semi-arid, it was definitively not

the dominant party in most of them, and therefore one of the winners from this mechanism.

Accordingly, we believe that the logic above could also be applied to any other policy that aims to

distribute irrevocable benefits. For example, the cash transfer program in Brazil, Bolsa Família, was

32

created by PT in 2003 to provide a stable and significant income increase to all poor households in the

country. Given that program eligibility is beyond the control of local politicians by design, it has a

similar effect on local clientelism (Frey, 2017) (and local only). Former president Dilma Rousseff even

indicated that Bolsa Família has an ‘anti-clientelism’ motivation, by stating that the program “swept

the centenary clientelistic policies out of Brazil”.48 In this spirit, the findings here open a new avenue

for future research on clientelism, one that also focus on ‘what’ machines distribute, as opposed to

only on ‘how’ they do it.

48http://goo.gl/s6EVB5.

33

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38

Appendix (for online publication only)

A Mathematical Appendix

Proof of Proposition 2.

The ratio of probabilities of receiving a cistern in aligned and unaligned municipalities is given

by, as shown in teh main text:

𝑔𝑎𝑔𝑢

= [𝜂 + (𝛼 − 𝑐𝑚)𝜂 − (𝛼 − 𝑐𝑚)]

( 11−𝛾 )

(8)

Now, set 𝑓 = 𝜂+(𝛼−𝑐𝑚)𝜂−(𝛼−𝑐𝑚) . The derivative of the ratio above with respect to 𝑔𝑎𝑚𝑚𝑎 is given by:

𝜕𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝜕𝛾

= 1(1 − 𝛾)2 × 𝑙𝑛(𝑓 ) × 𝑓 ( 1

1−𝛾 ) (9)

The first and last terms are always positive. The second term is positive (negative) when 𝑓 > 1

(𝑓 < 1). This gives us the result.

B Additional Details on the RD design

One common concern for this identification strategy is that, if the position of municipalities can

be manipulated around the treatment assignment threshold, the estimated effects might be biased.49

For example, if aligned candidates win municipal elections more often within the entire sample of

municipalities, this does not represent a threat to the research design here. However, in close elec-

tions, aligned candidates cannot win or lose elections with a higher probability. As it is the practice

for RD designs, we show in Figure A.1 below that the density of observations is not significantly dif-

ferent around the discontinuity for both subsamples (weak and strong machine mayors), which is

also confirmed by the p-values of 0.2 and 0.8 found using the McCrary test (McCrary, 2008) for these

subsamples.49Eggers et al. (2015) find that this is the case for the RD design in house races in the USA, but not for Brazilian munici-

palities.

1

Figure A.1: Distribution of Observations Around the Discontinuity

p-values of 0.26 and 0.74 for the McCrary test, respectively. Weak machines on the left, strong ma-

chines on the right.

As it is also usual in RD designs, we show in Figure A.2 that many characteristics of municipali-

ties that are fixed or determined pre-treatment are balanced at the discontinuity threshold, for both

subsamples (i.e. weak- and strong-machine mayors). In other words, this test aims to show that these

other traits of municipalities are not the factors that determine the differences found in the outcome

variables. One exception here is the number households, which is significantly different at the dis-

continuity for the subsample of strong-machine mayors. Although it is not unusual to find at least

one significant coefficient when regressing 24 outcomes, we show that the RD results are robust to

this finding by including these outcomes as covariates in the main regression, and showing that the

coefficient remains relatively unchanged (Table 5 in the paper).

2

Figure A.2: Balance of Covariates

The points represent the t-values of the coefficient for alignment, in both relevant subsamples. We

show the coefficient for the optimal bandwidth for each variable, and for a bandwidth of 15 percentage

points in margin of victory, which is similar to the optimal bandwidth for the main outcome variables.

In Table ?? we show alternative specifications for our RDD estimates. Column (1) has the baseline

specification with bandwidths determined by the algorithm proposed by Calonico, Cattaneo, and

Titiunik (2014). Columns (2) and (3) show the results for double and half the optimal bandwidth,

respectively; and column (4) shows a quadratic specification for the local polynomial regression. We

include all covariates listed in Figure A.2. All regressions are estimated under the edge kernel.

3

Table A.1: Distribution of Cisterns by State Governments (RDD)

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Aligned (a) 0.737* 0.794* 0.740 0.848(0.408) (0.431) (0.528) (0.536)

Membership (b) 0.688* 0.515 0.747 0.619(0.401) (0.403) (0.504) (0.511)

Aligned * Membership (c) -1.541** -1.609** -1.816** -1.944**(0.557) (0.561) (0.704) (0.699)

(a) + (c) -0.804** -0.815** -1.076** -1.096**(0.379) (0.380) (0.466) (0.471)

Bandwidth 14.24 14.24 20.98 20.98Observations 1114 1114 1395 1395

Polynominal Linear Linear Quadratic QuadraticCovariates No Yes No Yes

*p<0.1, **p<0.05. Standard errors are heteroskedascity robust and presented in parenthesis. The covari-ates are all variables listed in Figure A.2.

The baseline results confirm what we have already discussed in the main text. The coefficients

remain relatively constant in all alternative specifications. On the specific case of cisterns, the inter-

action coefficient (Aligned x Strong Machine) loses statistical power at a narrower bandwidth, but its

magnitude remain more or less unchanged.

4

Table A.2: Allocation of State Discretionary Transfers

Dependent Variable: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Intercept -0.020 0.016 0.858** 0.003(0.084) (0.138) (0.254) (0.102)

Aligned (a) 0.561** 0.309* 0.257 0.431**(0.124) (0.168) (0.207) (0.154)

Membership (b) -0.080 -0.006 -0.027(0.147) (0.193) (0.038)

Aligned * Membership (c) 0.535* 0.804** 0.178(0.314) (0.379) (0.165)

(b) + (c) 0.455 0.798** 0.151(0.322) (0.374) (0.170)

Observations 3259 3259 2663 3259

*p<0.1, **p<0.05. Standard errors are clustered by municipality and presented in parenthesis. All re-gressions include fixed effects for time and municipality, and control for contemporaneous rain level.Columns (2) and (3) uses the log-linear variable for 𝑐𝑖𝑡, column (4) uses the linear version. Column (3) hasa reduced sample to match only the municipality-period observations in which the transfer was higherthan zero.

5

Figure A.3: Cistern

source: State Government of Maranhão.

6