Cold Bacon: Co-Partisan Politics in Brazil

Abstract

This paper provides evidence of alignment effects between the executive and legislative branches of the central government. We use detailed data on Brazilian intergovernmental grants whose allocation is determined by legislators. Although the executive branch cannot interfere with the destiny and volume of grants, it can control the pace of transfers. We show that legislators politically aligned to the executive branch transfer resources to their constituencies nine months faster than unaligned legislators. Since the data do not associate grants to legislators, we group the data into municipalities and estimate the effects of the share of aligned legislators associated with a municipality on the average time to receive grants. To achieve a causal interpretation of these results, we use an exogenous variation in the share of elected aligned legislators caused by the phased-in introduction of electronic voting. Municipalities that used electronic voting for the first time observed a smaller share of aligned legislators. These results are consistent across different periods and alternative definitions of the dependent variable.

Keywords: Alignment effects, Pork barrel, Electronic voting, Fiscal federalism

JEL Classification: D72, H77, O18