Local governance & decentralization
The predatory or virtuous choices governors make: political institutions and economic performance
Impact of checks & balances on policies in Brazil
Authors:
L. Alston; M. Melo; B. Mueller
Publisher:
Overseas Development Institute [ES], 2008
This paper explores the idea that political institutions are important determinants of the policies implemented in states.
The authors propose a model of the policymaking process and then test its implications with state-level data for the period 1999 to 2006 in Brazil. The focus of the empirical tests is on the impact of political competition and checks and balances on the characteristics of the policies that emerge in the states.
The paper shows that political competition has important virtuous effects on the choices made by governors and other political actors by determining how long they expect to be in power, what they can do while in power, and at what costs. The main argument is that the key determinants of these decisions are not ideologies, taste or personality, but rather the political institutions that determine the incentives and constraints faced by the governors in the pursuit of their own self-interest.
The authors also develop an index of checks and balances for Brazilian states and test the interaction of checks and balances with political competition. They find that the impact of political competition varies with the degree of checks and balances.
Given that political competition has an overwhelmingly virtuous effect, The authors conclude that greater levels of checks and balances are generally more desirable, as they will either amplify those effects, when the interaction is complementary, or act as a replacement when the interaction is a substitute.
