Powering votes? The effects of energy subsidies on electoral outcomes
Energy subsidies persist worldwide despite a broad consensus that they are fiscally costly, poorly targeted, and environmentally distortive. One explanation is political: incumbents may expect electoral rewards for granting them and punishment for removing them, yet the magnitude of these returns is poorly understood. This paper estimates the causal electoral effect of a salient energy subsidy by exploiting the 2021 extension of Argentina's Cold Zone Law, which enlarged a residential gas subsidy in the middle of a legislative election year, cutting bills by 30–50% for roughly three million new customers. Because the newly covered area follows a bio-climatic map drawn years before the reform, the boundary provides quasi-random variation in subsidy status across electoral circuits. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design, I compare the change in the vote share of the policy-associated Kirchnerist/Peronist alliance between the 2017 and 2021 general legislative elections on either side of the new border. Newly subsidised circuits increased their support for the incumbent alliance by roughly five percentage points relative to circuits that remained excluded. The results point to a sizable electoral reward that helps explain why energy subsidies persist.
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Es PhD Candidate in Economics at the University of California, Davis. Su agenda de investigación se centra en la intersección entre las finanzas públicas y la economía de la energía. Previamente, obtuvo la Licenciatura y la Maestría en Economía en la Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP).
Doctor en Economía, University of California at Berkeley. Director de la Licenciatura en Artes Liberales y Ciencias, un bachillerato universitario (BA). Fue presidente de la Asociación Argentina de Economía Política y editor en jefe del Journal of Applied Economics. Publicó en Ensayos Económicos, Económica, Journal of Development Economics, Estudios de Economía, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Public Choice, Kyklos, Economics & Politics, Economía LACEA Journal y History of Economic Ideas, entre otras revistas académicas. Trabaja en un libro sobre el BA para flexibilizar la educación universitaria en Iberoamérica. Ciclista urbano y corredor.