Nelson A. Ruiz

How do electoral outcomes affect campaign contributions? We argue that in contexts where personal connections to the candidate and investment motivations dominate ideology and partisanship as drivers of donations, two main factors shape donors’ future behaviour: 1) government benefits accrued by donors (for example, contracts) and 2) whether the supported candidate runs again in future elections. Using data from Colombian mayoral elections, a context with no re-election, weak parties, and non-ideological races, we find that donating to the winning candidate reduces the probability of donating in the next election. We further show that, among donors to the winner, those who receive a contract from the municipality are more likely to continue donating than those without contracts. The findings highlight the importance of personal loyalty to the candidate and the fulfilment of donors’ investment expectations determining campaign contributions in non-established democracies.

Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used in the social sciences to estimate causal effects from observational data. Following recent methodological advances, scholars can choose from various RDD estimators for point estimation and inference. This decision is mainly guided by theoretical results on optimality and Monte Carlo simulations because of a paucity of research on the performance of the different estimators in recovering real-world experimental benchmarks. Leveraging exact ties in personal votes in local elections in Colombia and Finland, which are resolved by a random lottery, we assess the performance of various estimators featuring different polynomial degrees, bias-correction methods, optimal bandwidths, and approaches to statistical inference. Using re-running and re-election as outcomes, we document only minor differences in the performance of the various implementation approaches when the conditional expectation function (CEF) of the outcomes in the vicinity of the discontinuity is close to linear. When approximating the curvature of the CEF is more challenging, bias-corrected and robust inference with coverage-error-rate-optimal bandwidths comes closer to the experimental benchmark than more widely used alternative implementations.

While existing work has demonstrated that campaign donations can buy access to benefits such as favorable legislation and preferential contracting, we highlight another use of campaign contributions: buying reductions in regulatory enforcement. Specifically, we argue that in return for campaign contributions, Colombian mayors who rely on donor-funding (compared with those who do not) choose not to enforce sanctions against illegal deforestation activities. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that deforestation is significantly higher in municipalities that elect donor-funded as opposed to self-funded politicians. Further analysis shows that only part of this effect can be explained by differences in contracting practices by donor-funded mayors. Instead, evidence of heterogeneity in the effects according to the presence of alternative formal and informal enforcement institutions, and analysis of fire clearance, support the interpretation that campaign contributions buy reductions in the enforcement of environmental regulations.

Donors to political campaigns are characterized as either investors who seek an economic return on their donations or as consumers who use their donations to express their preferences. We present a theory that predicts donation behavior over time for both types of donors in an electoral context with non-ideological races and weak parties. To test the theory, we study donors in Colombian mayoral elections and explore (1) whether they donated to the winner of a previous election and (2) whether their contributions depend on past rewards via public contracts. Consistent with our theory, a regression discontinuity design analysis demonstrates that donating to the winning candidate reduces the probability of donating in the next election, but that donors to the winner who receive a public contract are more likely to continue donating. Overall, the evidence indicates that the persistence of donations is influenced by whether donors' investment expectations are met.

Ballot positions affect the electoral performance of parties. Existing theories for this effect focus on voter-specific behavioral explanations. We present evidence on an additional unexplored mechanism: parties adjust their behavior to account for their position on the ballot. This adjustment matters for how we interpret existing results. First, we use local lotteries of ballot positions across two elections and 1974 races in Colombia. We find evidence for a ballot position effect of 6.6 percent on vote share, and 8.8 percent on seat share. Second, we show that parties raise and spend more money on their campaigns if they are at top spot on the ballot. Finally, we show that campaign spending is correlated with higher vote shares. Our results suggest that existing work may be overstating the contribution of the voter behavioral mechanism on ballot order effects, and should account for strategic adjustments of campaigns by parties.

Traditional theories of democracy suggest that political representation of excluded groups can reduce their incentives to engage in conflict. We consider the response of elites whose power is threatened by new political actors and study the consequences of political inclusion in a context of weak institutions. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we show that the narrow election of previously excluded left-wing parties to local executive office in Colombia results in an almost one-standard-deviation increase in violent attacks by right-wing paramilitaries. We interpret this surge in violence as a de facto reaction of traditional political and economic elites, who seek to offset the increase in outsiders' de jure political power. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that violence by left-wing guerrillas and other actors is unaffected, and that levels of violence are not influenced by the victory of right-wing or other new parties in close elections.