Accountability & Distributive Politics: Evidence from a Mexican Electoral Reform

• In Event: Campaigns, Elections, and Ideology in Legislative Politics

Abstract

Without the possibility of reelection, it is difficult for voters to hold politicians accountable. To date, research on how reelection affects politicians' behavior has used variation in term limits. We contribute to this literature by leveraging the natural experiment posed by the staggered implementation of the 2014 Mexican Electoral Reform, which lifted an eighty year-old constitutional ban on reelection. This enables us to study how the possibility of reelection influences legislators behavior after reaching office in a system characterized by highly-disciplined parties. We argue that introducing the chance of reelection pushes politicians to focus on policies with the highest electoral yield; specifically, particularlistic policies. Applying quantitative text analysis to a new collection of 7,271 legislative sessions of 21 Mexican state legislatures from 2012 to 2018, we estimate the proportion of discussion devoted to particularistic, targeted, costly and public policies. Using a difference-in-differences approach to compare the states where reelection was possible with states where reelection remained banned, we find first that long-term electoral incentives decrease the amount of attention devoted to public policies and increase that devoted to particularistic and targeted policies. Second, we document evidence of the emergence of an electoral cycle, in which legislators pay more attention to targeted policies and less attention to public policies closer the next election. Our results help clarify the link between electoral accountability and distributive policies in countries with high party discipline, such as Mexico, and more generally.

Author

• Lucia Motolinia, New York University