ESSAYS ON THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL ALIGNMENT FOR THE REDISTRIBUTION OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL RESOURCES IN BRAZIL - ANALYSIS WITH DISCONTINUOUS REGRESSION”
political alignment, transfers, subsidies, regression discontinuity, electoral competition, swing voter.
Several studies point to a low effectiveness in the allocation of Brazilian public resources to solve the problems that gave rise to their creation, and some of them are distributed discretionally by the federal government daily to the Executive Branch of other levels of government in search of political support. This distribution goes through negotiations carried out through the National Congress.
Considering this motivation, our main purpose is to answer the following question: What is the impact of political alignment between federal government and municipalities on discretionary public resource allocation in Brazil?
To contextualize this theme, it begins with a broad review of the academic literature. At first, two instruments of bibliometric analysis are used. Then, the articles that make up the theoretical literature related to this Thesis are presented and a deepening is carried out, with a detailed exposition, of two of the main theoretical articles on the subject.
Next, three original articles are presented, which, using the RDD approach, seek to analyze the influence that the party alignment between the municipal level of government and the federal level exerts on:
one of the largest federal subsidy programs, Minha Casa Minha Vida, in the period between 2009 and 2016;
federal transfers to municipalities through agreements for the period between 2009 and 2020; and
revenues from municipal credit operations, which are mostly conditioned by guarantees granted by the Union, for the period between 2009 and 2020.
The main result presented by the work indicates that there is a tendency to allocate resources in regions where there is greater electoral competition, in line with the theoretical model of Lindbeck and Weibull (1987). On the other hand, there is also evidence in favor of the effect of tying the enemy's hands, in a more restricted way and with a limited degree of robustness, for transfers from the Union through agreements, corroborating the results found by Brollo and Nannicini (2012). It should be noted that this Thesis adds analyzes for each electoral cycle. This addition indicates that the effect of "tying the enemy's hands" may have been changing in recent years or may have been fortuitous, as it explores a period that had not been covered by that article.