Do Programmatic Policies Increase Political Engagement?

• In Event: Clientelism and Political Behavior

Abstract

The idea that voters influence policy is one of the pillars of democracy. However, whether policies also affect political attitudes remains unclear, especially in the context of poor and developing democracies. Common behavioral explanations for why and how voters respond to policies include clientelism -- some redistributive policies have the power to break clientelistic linkages between politicians and voters -- or credit claiming -- where voters retrospectively reward incumbents for the implementation of desirable policies. This article focuses on the impact of redistributive policies on the political engagement of poor voters, and proposes an alternative channel: political engagement increases when voters perceive that their ability to directly influence the public sector increases, which can be achieved by a policy design that requires active citizen engagement. We test and disentangle these mechanisms using a multivariate regression discontinuity design in funding for a large health program in Brazil, combined with the membership rolls for all Brazilian parties, and administrative data on the 12 million families served by the largest conditional cash transfers in the world.

Author

• Anderson Frey, University of Rochester