Ciclos Políticos e Eleitorais na Execução do Programa Bolsa Família em Nível Municipal

We investigate under the municipal perspective if political and electoral cycles occur in the Bolsa Família Program (PBF) execution. As the local governments play a crucial role in the PBF's provision of resources either guaranteeing and monitoring conditionalities or registering families in the program, we develop a social welfare theoretical model in which the incumbent mayor takes the problem of representative resident and sets the municipal supply function of Bolsa Família (BF). We estimate this supply function using panel data models with municipality fixed effects and year fixed effects by region. Our estimates show that mayors behave strategically by increasing the provision of BF during electoral years between 2.6% and 144%, depending on the region. We found North, Center-West and Northeast regions have intensities of electoral cycles above the estimate for Brazil and Southeast and South regions, below. This result may be because of the bigger information asymmetry among voters and the incumbent mayor, for instance, because residents of North, Center-West and Northwest regions are much less interested in monitoring and collecting information on politicians' performance than residents of the Southeast and South. Finally, the effects of the political cycles, those resulting from the partisan alignment of the mayor with the governor and president, were much less important for the implementation of the PBF than those of the electoral cycles.