The Local Electoral Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfers in the Philippines: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Can anti-poverty programs implemented by the central government at the local level increase local incumbents’ re-election chances? Strategic concerns on the part of the central government have made it challenging to causally interpret correlations observed in the data. Recently, researchers have used data from quasi-experiments to provide evidence consistent with a causal impact of increased government spending on local incumbents’ re-election chances (Brollo, Nannicini, Perotti, and Tabellini, 2010; Litschig and Morrison, 2010). If that is the case, there is a risk that the loss associated with this indirect decrease in local electoral accountability outweighs the direct benefits from government spending. This concern might be especially acute in the case of anti-poverty programs targeted to poor districts that are often governed by poorly performing elected local officials. Even in situations where such programs have direct long-term benefits on household welfare, those impacts could be mitigated by negative impacts on accountability…