Political Ambition and Subnational Redistributive Spending

LUCAS GONZALEZ; GERMAN LODOLA

Institutional Innovation and the Steering of Conflicts in Latin America

The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)

Lugar: Colchester; Año: 2017; p. 219 - 250

This chapter examines the causal relation between political ambition and government spending, a phenomenon that has surprisingly received little scholarly attention. We study this connection at the subnational level by estimating the potential effect of state executives? (i.e., governors) political ambitions ?whether they are national-centered or state-centered? on their strategic decisions to allocate social infrastructure and personnel spending. We explore the ambitions-public expenditures link in Argentina, where governors are regarded as powerful political actors and both electoral rules and federal fiscal institutions provide ample room for gubernatorial spending discretion. Our empirical results indicate that along with the level of provincial legislative fragmentation and incumbent electoral risk, subnational variation in social infrastructure and personnel expenditures is in part attributable to the structure of governors? office ambitions. We substantiate that gubernatorial incentives for increasing social expenditure allocations are stronger in provinces where the incumbent governors manifest a national-centered political ambition. By contrast, incentives for increasing personnel outlays are stronger where governors have state-centered (typically reelection) aspirations. We explain these different results by stressing the varied nature of electoral linkages between politicians and constituencies.