Benjamin Marx, MIT
Benjamin Marx, MIT
Elections as Incentives: Project Completion and Visibility in African Politics
Elections as Incentives: Project Completion and Visibility in African Politics
This paper investigates the causal effect of electoral incentives on policy implementation in Sub-Saharan Africa. I estimate both the impact of project completion on electoral outcomes and the responsiveness of government effort to upcoming elections. Using a dataset of investment projects funded by the World Bank between 1995-2014, I show that voters reward incumbents for completing visible projects – projects in infrastructure and social services – before national elections. The causal effect of completion is identified from an instrumental variables strategy that exploits variation in the portfolio size of project team leaders at the World Bank. Using a different instrument that predicts the occurrence of elections based on pre-determined constitutional rules, I then show that governments respond to these incentives by expediting project completion in visible sectors before elections. These effects are not driven by intertemporal substitution of government effort across the electoral cycle. Finally, I provide evidence that democratic institutions accelerate project completion in visible sectors on aggregate. Even in Africa’s recent or hybrid democratic regimes, elections create incentives for politicians to deliver tangible policy outputs.