Opposing Chavez

The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela's Maisanta

http://papers.nber.org/papers/W14923

Chang-Tai Hsieh, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, Francisco Rodriguez

In 2004, the Chavez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters whom had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chavez political opponent.

We find that voters who were identified as Chavez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.5 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the loss aggregate TFP from the misallocation of workers across jobs was substantial, on the order of 3 percent of GDP.

Electoral Accountability and Corruption

This is very replicable research… that is, if we only had reelection… and good data on corruption.

Electoral Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from the Audits of Local Governments

April 2009
Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14937

Political institutions can affect corruption. We use audit reports from an anti-corruption program in Brazil to construct new measures of political corruption in local governments and test whether electoral accountability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians. We find significantly less corruption in municipalities where mayors can get reelected. Mayors with re-election incentives misappropriate 27 percent fewer resources than mayors without re-election incentives. These effects are more pronounced among municipalities with less access to information and where the likelihood of judicial punishment is lower. Overall our findings suggest that electoral rules that enhance political accountability play a crucial role in constraining politician’s corrupt behavior.

Elecciones intermedias México 2009

El Universal del día de hoy, Lunes 11 de mayo de 2009, me publicó un breve artículo sobre las preferencias electorales al inicio de la campaña.

“Apenas comenzaron las campañas oficiales rumbo a la elección de diputados federales y ya es común preguntarnos cómo afectará la influenza el resultado del 5 de julio próximo y, sobre todo, si ésta beneficiará o perjudicará al PAN. Antes de especular vale la pena repasar lo que ha ocurrido en elecciones intermedias recientes. En 1997 el PRI perdió 61 curules; y en 2003 el PAN perdió 59 asientos de los 207 con que contaba. Sucede que es común observar que en elecciones intermedias el partido del Presidente pierde fuerza en el Poder Legislativo por muy diversas razones: por un lado los efectos de arrastre de los candidatos presidenciales están ausentes y, por otro lado, se dice que el electorado hace una especie de referéndum sobre la gestión de un presidente que se desgasta más que sus opositores…”

Pueden leer el resto aquí.

Una columna previa sobre popularidad presidencial, publicada el jueves 2 de abril de 2009, está aquí.