@article{74fdd68ad91341a9b09d536a01bec9d3,
title = "Can political alignment be costly?",
abstract = "Research on the benefits of political alignment suggests that voters who elect governing party politicians are better off than those who elect other politicians. We examine this claim with regression discontinuity designs that isolate the effect of electing a governing party politician on an important publicly provided service in Pakistan: Health. Consistent with existing research, governing party constituents receive a higher quantity of services; more doctors are assigned to work in governing party areas. However, despite many more assigned doctors, there is no increase in doctor attendance. These findings contrast with the literature on political alignment by showing that alignment to the governing party affects voters{\textquoteright} welfare ambiguously: Higher potential quantity of services may come at the cost of lower quality.",
author = "Michael Callen and Saad Gulzar and Arman Rezaee",
note = "Funding Information: The authors thank Sarah Brierley, Miriam Golden, Ali Hasanain, Maira Hayat, Yasir Khan, Jennifer Larson, Eugenia Nazrullaeva, Benjamin Pasquale, Cyrus Samii, Shanker Satyanath, Renard Sexton, Jacob Shapiro, David Stasavage, and Pablo Querubin for helpful comments. They also thank seminar participants at Columbia University, Northeast Workshop in Empirical Political Science (UPenn), UCLA, George Mason, APSA, and MPSA Annual Meetings for suggestions. Finally, they thank Muhammad Zia Mehmood and Khwaja Umair for excellent research assistance. Funding Information: The human subjects components of this study received institutional review board approval from the University of California, San Diego; support for this research was provided by the International Growth Centre (IGC) political economy program and the IGC Pakistan Country Office. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JOP Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop). An online appendix with supplementary material is available at https://doi.org/10.1086/706890. 1. Governing party politicians are election winners who belong to the party that forms government in the state in the same election. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.",
year = "2020",
month = apr,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1086/706890",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "82",
pages = "612--626",
journal = "Journal of Politics",
issn = "0022-3816",
publisher = "Cambridge University Press",
number = "2",
}