All that legislates is not gold: Representation and redistribution in Chile

A large body of literature documents a positive relationship between legislative representation and redistribution, particularly in the United States. Standard legislative bargaining models further reinforce this expectation. Yet both theory and empirical findings rely on two critical assumptions: that legislatures possess sufficient budgetary authority and that legislators face strong electoral incentives. This paper shows that, in a context where those conditions do not hold, the link between representation and redistribution disappears. We study the effect of representation on intergovernmental transfers in Chile, a unitary country that a Congress with has limited budgetary power, elected in multi-member districts. We exploit two quasi-natural experiments-the authoritarian origins of the electoral system and its recent reform-to provide causal identification. Across both sources of exogenous variation in representation, we find no significant effects on redistribution. Our findings highlight the mediating role of institutions in shaping the consequences of legislative malapportionment.