Carrerismo político y gasto social en sistemas federales. El caso de los gobernadores en Argentina (1993-2009)

LUCAS GONZALEZ; GERMAN LODOLA

Mendoza

Congreso; XII Congreso Nacional de Ciencia Política; 2015

Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Político (SAAP)

Government spending is a powerful tool subnational incumbents can utilize to favor different social groups in a federation. As such, it spreads out redistributive conflicts over who gets what (and how) in multi-level democracies. Schematically, subnational governments can either benefit specific groups by allocating public resources to particularistic goods or they can favor a large majority of citizens by delivering collective goods. In this paper, we analyze the institutional, contextual, and individual-level factors that affect subnational governments? redistributive spending choices. In contrast to prior research that has concentrated on both institutional and contextual determinants of government spending, we emphasize that individual factors largely explain why subnational incumbents decide to reward certain groups of citizens over others thus shaping redistributive conflicts within their territorial jurisdictions. Our analysis focuses on Argentina, which is an ideal case for examining this issue due to its particular political institutions. Our empirical results indicate a strong effect of governors? political ambitions on public spending across Argentine provinces. Concretely, we substantiate that gubernatorial incentives for increasing expenditures in social infrastructure are stronger in provinces where the governor manifests a national-centered ambition. By contrast, incentives for increasing jobs, wages and salaries in the provincial civil administration are stronger where the governor has a state-centered (typically reelection) goal. We explain these different results by stressing the varied nature of electoral linkages between office-seeking politicians and their constituencies (Kitschelt 2000; Kitschelt and Williamson 2007). Our central argument is that different office ambitious promote different modes of citizen-politician linkages. Governors who nationalize their office ambition need to gain popularity abroad their provinces so that they will favor the provision of collective (non-excludable) goods that are visible and target broader constituencies. In contrast, governors who seek to remain in their home provinces will favor the allocation of particularistic (excludable) goods because this form of spending is much safer in their expected returns and allows the incumbent to build a patronage-based network of political support that reinforce provincial dominance. We also find empirical evidence that some political-institutional variables affect subnational expenditure allocations in Argentina. As reported by prior research, political fragmentation (both electoral and legislative) reduces gubernatorial incentives to allocate collective goods while fosters particularism. Contrary to previous works, however, we find that electoral uncertainty as measured by the margin of victory have no statistical association with spending patterns. With regards to the role of contextual variables, the statistical results show that election cycles have minimal to no effect depending on model specifications. Finally, in contrast to past studies on fiscal federalism, we demonstrate that governors from provinces that found a greater portion of public expenditures through their own revenues (as opposed to fiscal dependency from intergovernmental transfers) are positively associated to civil administration outlays, even after controlling for relevant macroeconomic and demographic variables.