3. Political Institutions, Political Competition and Redistributive Policies in Brazil
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3. To understand the role of political institutions on the decision-making of redistributive policies, particularly voting behavior and law-making process. As can be observed, the dimension 2 takes public policies as an independent factor, capable of affecting inequality reduction, poverty alleviation, access to jobs, or achieved status whereas the dimension 3 takes public policies as a dependent factor, whose origin can be observed and explained by the political system and actor strategies. Two projects will aim at answering empirical questions related to this puzzle:
3.1. the extent of actual electoral competition in elections, and so, whether inequality-reduction policies indeed implemented can be understood as expressing clientelistic connections with poor voters instead of being the expression of the expected impact of median voter preferences, to be coordinated by Fernando Limongi in collaboration with Jose Antonio Cheibub and Wendy Cho (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Ernesto Calvo (University of Maryland), Miguel de Figueiredo (University of Berkeley (PhD Candidate) and Fernando Guarnieri (post-doc at CEM);
3.2. the political factors explaining the adoption of federal-led redistributive policies, whose content aims both at providing revenues for subnational governments to implement service-provision policies and tightly regulating their execution, to be by coordinated by Marta Arretche, in collaboration with Charles Jeffery (University of Edinburgh) and Rogerio Schlegel (post-doc at CEM).