Bypassing the Enemy: Distributive Politics, Credit Claiming, and Nonstate Organizations in Brazil

Abstract

How do incumbents prevent the opposition from claiming credit for government programs? The received scholarly wisdom is that central government authorities favor copartisans in lower tiers of government to reward allies and punish opponents. Yet this depiction ignores the range of strategies available to incumbents at the center. I argue that another effective strategy is to channel resources through nonstate organizations, thus bypassing the opposition and reducing “credit hijacking.” Using a regression-discontinuity design with data from Brazil, I show that mayors from the president’s party receive more resources, but that the election of an opposition mayor induces the central government to shift resources to nonstate organizations that operate in the locality. Original survey data, fieldwork, and data on organizations’ leaders support the claim that opposition mayors do not hijack credit from government spending through nonstate organizations.