We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Felipe Nunes (UCLA)
A Bayesian Two-part Latent Class Model for Longitudinal Government Expenditure Data: Assessing the Impact of Vertical Political Alliances and Vote Support.
Citation:
National leaders often face a dilemma about how best to allocate their government's limited distributional resources to their greatest political advantage. Felipe Nunes studies this problem with a focus on South American and Latin American countries in which leaders are torn between directing funds to their voters in the national elections and to their supporters in local electoral contests. Seeding a Bayesian Two-Part Latent Class Model with elicited priors based on interviews with government officials, Nunes uncovers temporal patterns in government expenditures. Importantly, this work shows that funds are targeted at national voters just prior to national elections, but are sent to local allies immediately prior to local elections. Regions lacking either supportive voters or local allies receive little or no distributive funds whatsoever. For innovative methods addressing important political processes, the committee commends Felipe Nunes with the Best Poster Award.