Opportunistic political cycles and social spending: an examination of transition and consolidated democracies in Latin America

Abstract

In this paper, we show that education, health and social security expenditures did not increase during elections. Based on a panel of fifteen Latin American democracies from 1973 to 2000, we show that there are important increases in social spending in the inaugural year of a new presidential administration. We argue that social policy is used by Latin American democracies as an instrument to reward voters after winners enter office and not as a tool to manipulate outcomes before elections as commonly argued in the literature.