When Pay Outs Pay Off: Conditional Cash-Transfers and Voting Behavior in Brazil 2002---2010

Abstract

This paper estimates the electoral effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) --- the fastest-growing social policy in the developing world --- in three presidential elections in Brazil. It analyzes municipal level electoral results and survey data, and employs matching techniques to reduce causal inference problems typical of observational studies. Results shows that CCTs are associated with increased performance by the incumbent party presidential candidate in all three elections, but that these effects have diminished over time, and have been reaped by incumbents from different parties. It also shows that CCTs have had no discernible impacts on party identification and the performance of incumbent parties in legislative elections. Together, these findings suggest that CCTs effects are short lived, similar to that of good economic performance in retrospective economic voting models, and as such, lack the capacity to induce substantial voter realignments.