Cold bacon: co-partisan politics in Brazil

Abstract

This paper provides evidence of alignment effects between the executive and the legislative branches of the central government. We rely on detailed data on Brazilian intergovernmental grants whose allocations are determined by legislators. The executive branch cannot interfere with the destinies or volumes of grants, but it can control the transfer pace. 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. We show that legislators politically aligned to the executive branch transfer resources to their constituencies nine months faster than unaligned legislators. To achieve a causal interpretation of these results, we rely on exogenous variations in the shares of elected aligned legislators caused by the phased-in introduction of electronic voting. Our findings regarding how political alignment affects the speed of transfer are consistent across different periods and alternative definitions of the dependent variable.