Intra-party decision-making significantly impacts federal decentralization. I examine how the choice of candidate selectors affects executive and legislative decentralization across 11 federal systems. Using a Two-way Fixed-effects model, I find a quadratic relationship between candidate selection decentralization and federal decentralization, moderated by regional party branches. As candidate selection decentralizes, legislative party cohesiveness declines due to Conflicting Principals Problems (CPP) between national leaders and subnational selectorates. However, this relationship is non-linear: centralized selection fosters party unity, while fully decentralized selection favors centralization by increasing collective action issues among dispersed selectors. Shared selectorates at the subnational level may mitigate these effects, providing stability. Additional evidence from a Multilevel Linear Model with party-level data supports these findings. This research extends our understanding of federal decentralization by tracing its institutional roots to party and electoral systems beyond Eurocentric federations.
Multiparty government creates an expansionary effect on public spending and government size unless budgeting is institutionally constrained. I argue that in multilevel systems, subnational governments are institutionally constrained vertically by higher orders of government. Nevertheless, the same multilevel institutional arrangement creates soft budget constraints that allow for irresponsible uses of public credit. I look at the Mexican local governments after the 2021 midterm elections, which had two coalitions as main competitors across municipalities. I find that under vertical constraints, coalition governments have a reductive effect on public expenditures, which diminishes on the interaction with coalition size, particularly in patronageable expenditures. I test this hypothesis on a battery of income and expenditure variables with positive results for patronageable goods as well as income variables such as conditional transfers and public debt. I add evidence for the causal mechanism of formateurs paying intra-cabinet support by providing patronage goods to coalition partners with a Discontinuity Design on patronageable goods and different types of income.
With Ytzel Maya & Mateo Servent
What drives the expansion of state capacity in the absence of inter-state conflict? Recent research highlights the role of inter-elite conflict in sustaining low-capacity traps. When governing elites (rulers) and non-ruling economic elites coexist, their conflicting interests—taxing and policing for rulers versus profit maximization—create a fragile equilibrium. Using this framework, we characterize Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) as non-ruling elites and argue that the legalization of marijuana in California acted as an external shock, reducing DTOs’ economic power and enabling capacity expansion by governing elites. This study sheds light on state capacity formation in source regions and low-capacity traps in the global south. To address data challenges in studying Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) and policing institutions, we use a Difference-in-Differences design around the enactment of California’s Prop 64. This strategy estimates the impact of marijuana legalization on state capacity in Mexican municipalities. As for the mechanism, we argue that DTOs reduced their agricultural output after Prop. 64, which is only rational as a response to demand contraction.
With Kahif Naqvi
Cuban American voters show partisan tendencies that have puzzled researchers for a long time. They are more Republican-leaning than any other sub-group of Latinos or the group as a whole. I posit that this is a direct consequence of household socialization in which Republicanism is perceived as ligated with the fight against communism. I propose to take advantage of a natural experiment that assigned voters to treatment in the past ---Cuban ancestors being exposed to the Castro regime--- for a treatment administered while in the US ---household socialization. I also propose that this socialization is likely to wane off as cohorts build up between the first emigrant of Cuba and their descendants. I propose a survey strategy to collect information in this regard and a Regression Discontinuity design strategy for analysis around an external shock that randomizes assignment to treatment in the present, the Mariel Boatlift of 1980.