My dissertation focuses on how presidents allocate discretionary funds to localities. I study national leaders who often face a dilemma about how to allocate limited distributional resources to their greatest political advantage. I argue that the president's resource allocation strategy depends on the level of decentralization in a country. Presidents wish to allocate resources to their supporters in the electorate, and in centralized countries, they can do so directly, without any interference from local politicians. In decentralized countries, however, presidents must rely on local politicians as brokers, intermediaries between themselves and voters. Accordingly, presidents target localities with co-partisan mayors, even if most voters in the municipality did not support the president in the last election in decentralized settings. By analyzing 12 years of spending data in 100,000 municipalities, I show that presidents indeed allocate more to municipalities with presidential core voters in centralized Argentina and Venezuela, but mostly deliver resources to municipalities with local allies in decentralized Brazil and Mexico. I also show that local politicians have more influence among voters in decentralized countries, and much less so in centralized cases. Using survey experiments and electoral observation data from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, I show that a co-partisan mayor helps the president's approval and vote share in decentralized, but not in centralized systems. By increasing the power of local politicians, decentralization creates an incentive for the president to support co-partisan mayors. In centralized countries, mayors are neither a threat nor an aid to presidential electoral prospects. By shaping presidential incentives, the degree of centralization affects short-term resource allocation and long-term efforts at party-building. These results help us to understand why in Venezuela and in Argentina presidents were able to deliver targetable goods to their voters in a higher pace than Brazil and Mexico presidents.

In this dissertation, I ask why certain types of parties would agree to support creating or empowering sub-national governments. In particular, I focus on nationalized parties -- those that gain support from throughout a country. Political decentralization can negatively impact nationalized parties in at least two ways. First, it reduces the amount of power a party can enjoy should it win control of the national-level government. Second, previous studies show that political decentralization can increase party denationalization, meaning regional parties gain more support, even during national-level elections. I argue that nationalized parties may support decentralization when doing so reduces the ideological conflicts over national-level policy among voters whose support they seek. By altering political institutions, a party may be able to accommodate differing policy preferences in different parts of the country, or limit the damage to the party's electoral fortunes such differences could create.

I primarily focus on the case of Scottish devolution in the United Kingdom, tracing the evolution of the British Labour Party's attitudes towards the issue. I argue that devolution became an integral part of the New Labour platform because it allowed the party to moderate

its economic policies to cater to English preferences without losing Scottish votes to the Scottish National Party. I then develop a formal model representing the challenges a nationalized party faces when trying to win votes in more than one region of a country. I show that a party may be able to win votes using a combination of policy and political decentralization when it would be unable to do so using a single national-level policy alone. Furthermore, I hypothesize that a nationalized party should be more likely to support political decentralization when the preferences of voters in different regions diverge from each other. After applying this model to the United Kingdom, I explore some if its implications using the cases of decentralization in Spain and Belgium.

This dissertation examines the nature of party competition in the African democracies. Political parties are an integral part of contemporary democracy where their choices of favored policies create winners and losers and therefore supporters and opponents. Yet the role of parties vis-?-vis policy choice remains poorly understood in Africa. I scrutinize economic interests, whose policy preferences are collective but also exclusive, that form the bases of political support for parties. I argue that industrial sectors shape the basis of party support.

I examine case studies of African democracies that have experienced partisan alternation in power to learn how parties have strategically transformed the sizes and the dimensionality of their support bases and how they vary over time and across countries. My first case is Ghana where the two major parties have managed to develop stable, multiethnic support bases. While each party has its stronghold, economically and ethnically defined, a candidate cannot win the presidency without appealing to the unattached voters. The example of Zambia shows how parties can and do adapt the “shapes” of their support bases by shifting the dimension of political competition from ethnic cleavages to policy issues and by narrowing the range of a targeted support base. While a largest voting bloc on any dimension is often sufficiently large to set the basis of a winning coalition, if politicians are successful in reducing its size to a smallest winning, they gain most benefits possible. But if they overshoot, they can lose everything. In my third empirical chapter, I examine how economic interests based on agricultural subsectors account for seemingly ethnic coalitions in Kenya. The case study highlights voting behavior of cross-pressured voters whose ethnicity and economic stakes pull them in different directions. The vote decisions by the co-ethnics of the third place presidential candidates reveal that the sector-based voting provides a powerful explanation of the political coalitions even in ethnically divided countries. The main argument is that African parties are “normal,” in that they do not exclusively trade in clientelistic favors for ethnic kin, but also offer policy promises to attract broader support.

In recent years, developed Western democracies have seen the rapid rise of new political forces, including movements commonly described as “populist”, “nationalist” or “sovereigntist”, but also new forms of opposition against these movements. A growing body of research identifies these changes as the product a realignment driven by the differential impact of globalization on these societies. In this dissertation, I build on this research by arguing that geography plays a key role in shaping this realignment. The benefits of globalization tend to concentrate in large metropolitan areas, while the rest of the country bears the brunt of its negative effects. As a result, developed democracies see the rise of a political cleavage opposing these two geographic entities, with large urban areas increasingly distinguishing themselves from less-dense communities in their voting patterns and other political behaviors. I test this argument by examining geographic variations in socioeconomic and electoral patterns in four major developed democracies: France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. I find clear evidence for this dynamic in three countries, with Germany presenting some null findings. Complementing the geographic analysis, I also examine individual-level attitudes and behavior through recent, high-quality survey data from the United States. This data reveals that the political cleavage between large urban areas and the rest of the country persists even when controlling for individual socioeconomic characteristics. This research sheds light on a major transformation in Western politics, which has already resulted in stunning electoral upsets with major repercussions for world politics.

I develop and test a new political logic of ethnic local autonomy (minzu quyu zizhi) to explain how the designation of ethnic autonomous territories (EATs) shapes the governance of non-Han groups and sustains the Chinese Communist Party’s rule in post-1949 China. Building on the literatures on authoritarianism, decentralization, and ethnic politics, I argue that the strategic granting of ethnic local autonomy allows the central leader to establish his supremacy over subnational political elites while countering his rivals within the central leadership. Through statistical analysis, elite interviews, and archival research, I demonstrate that ethnic local autonomy is not simply introduced to defuse potential mobilization from non-Han groups. Instead, central leaders designate ethnic autonomous prefectures and counties to constrain the power of recalcitrant provincial elites when they face strong rivals within the Politburo. In a broad vein, my dissertation contributes to the literature on authoritarian power sharing and co-optation by moving the analytical focus beyond the central inner circle. By examining central-local relations in non-democratic states, I show that the most credible anti-regime threats are not necessarily the primary targets of the sharing institutions. Moreover, co-optation can serve as the autocrat’s strategic attempt to address the dilemma of delegation. Furthermore, my dissertation speaks to the literature on ethnic politics, which has largely overlooked the governance of ethnic diversity in non-democratic states and the impact of ethnic cleavages on autocratic survival. My dissertation explores not only the mechanisms through which the granting of ethnic local autonomy takes place but also how such institutional configuration affects regime stability. While most studies have examined how ethnic local autonomy can resolve or prevent ethnic conflicts, I demonstrate that ethnic local autonomy can also protect a regime from collapse by managing agency loss and power struggles within the dominant ethnic group. Unpacking the political dynamics that drive the introduction of ethnic local autonomy will be an important step to clarify how decentralization defuses or exacerbates conflicts.

This dissertation builds on a classic assertion in Political Science. It is axiomatic that organized interest groups can obtain and protect policies that are generally unpopular or inefficient for the economy as a whole because their opponents cannot overcome their own collective action problems. However, sometimes we do see unexpected policy changes. My work explains how a long-victorious special interest can be overcome by a newly organized (and newly advantaged) rival. In these cases, when facing two potential support groups (or opponents) making opposite policy demands, legislators have to choose which group to please and which to disappoint. The pro-status-quo group uses a strategy that threatens legislators with the loss of votes. To win this competition, pro-change lobbyists have to convince politicians that there is more to gain electorally from voting for the reform than from voting against it. I argue that a new balance in the relative power of competing organized groups is a key component to make politically costly policy changes possible.

I analyze an important and salient policy change in Brazil: a major reform to the pension system that dramatically reduced the special privileges for long-favored (and well-organized) groups of citizens. I present different sources of evidence that complement each other to support my claim. In the first empirical chapter of the dissertation, I analyze the financing sources of pro-change and pro-status-quo groups. I show how those who had succeeded in blocking radical reform in the pension system for decades had become, for the first time, weaker than those who pressured for changes. After collecting data on 100 million individual company contributions to peak business associations and worker contributions to unions (both in the public and private sectors), spanning the period from 2010 to 2020, I use the historic trends to describe how groups that supported changing the pension system were in a much stronger position than groups who preferred the status quo. For decades, the pro-status-quo group consistently collected twice the financial resources amassed by the pro-change groups. However, by the time Congress debated the new pension system, a law change had deprived both groups of most of their funding, but in relative terms, the pro-change groups emerged with 10 times the resources of their opponents, a complete reversal of relative lobbying power.

I analyze complementary data on lobbying credentials distributed by Congress to different organizations and find that they are also consistent with the reversal-of-fortunes story. For over two decades, those who mobilized against pension reforms -- mainly unions -- consistently had received more credentials to enter Congress and lobby lawmakers than other groups. However, after losing most of their financing, the number of unions that received credentials also dropped precipitously. By contrast, the pro-change groups -- mostly business federations -- saw an increase in the number of credentials by the time the pension bill went to the floor of Congress.

This type of observational data only allows me to make descriptive inferences about the relative power of these organizations and probably fails to account for many possible confounders. As researchers, we cannot observe the calculations made by deputies as they make decisions about which side could most affect their future election prospects. To overcome this challenge, I use an original experiment to investigate whether legislators' perceptions of the power of the pro-change group affected their susceptibility to lobbying by them. I partnered with an organization that assembles 51 of the largest companies working in Brazil. On the morning of the voting of the pension bill, I sent messages to the cellphones of all the 513 lawmakers who would vote on the proposal hours later. The treatment message had an extra piece of information reminding deputies of the economic and political power of the organization. If the pro-change groups need to show some power to overcome the impact of the unions ``vote you out" tactic, informing (treated) recipients that the group assembled the largest companies in the country would convey the idea that the drivers of the economy were unanimously behind the pension-system reforms. Indeed, despite waiting until the day of the vote to run the experiment, after weeks and months of lobbying had had a chance to influence legislators, I still found a treatment effect around 4 percentage points, one of the first experimental findings of the effect of lobbying on legislators' behavior.

In the last chapter of the dissertation I tackle the voter side of the puzzle. Do voters actually use information about legislators' policy decisions when choosing how to vote? Is the threat of the ``vote you out" tactic credible? Drawing from three original conjoint experiments, I provide evidence that, in general, voters do not use information about policy when deciding their votes for Congress. In these experiments, I randomly assigned characteristics for two fictional candidates running for Congress, varying information on party, experience, personal brand, and position on policies such as the pension reform. On average, the policy information did not change the probability that a candidate would be chosen by voters. In the pension case, evidence from the conjoint experiments show that the sole exception was that supporters of the Worker's Party (PT) were willing to punish legislators who had voted in favor of changing the rules.

Since the early 2000s, more and more governments in the developing world have introduced programs to transfer cash and deliver complementary public services directly to citizens using purely economic and other technical criteria. A number of careful studies on some of these programs show that political criteria play no role in predicting who does and does not receive benefits. Some scholars suggest that the rising popularity of non-discretionary distribution of public resources by politicians in some developing countries is indicative of a potential decline of clientelism in those countries. That political support for non-discretionary forms of resource distribution is growing and clientelism may be declining in the developing world is welcome news. But these emerging patterns of public resource distribution by politicians raise important questions. In this dissertation, I develop a theory to explain why politicians would design policies and allocate valued benefits to voters in ways that reduce or eliminate their own discretion. I argue that non-discretionary distributive strategies enable incumbent politicians to build electoral support and thus enhancing their chances of reelection in two ways: first, these strategies enable incumbents to extend benefits to voters outside their circle of loyal voters, potentially broadening their electoral support among those voters. Second, non-discretionary distributive strategies help to reduce the risk of offending and potentially alienating some of their loyal voters. This concern is particularly salient in Africa where access to state resources influences electoral behavior. I test this theory with audit and survey data collected in Ghana. I show that the patterns of resource allocation strategies by politicians and the electoral behavior of voters are best explained by the argument presented in this project.

Chapter 2 lays out the main argument and identifies a number of empirical implications. I contrast these implications with those of existing theories of clientelism and those on the effects of economic development on bureaucratic reforms. Chapter 2 concludes with preliminary evidence on the impact of public benefits on voting behavior in Ghana using the 2012 Afrobarometer survey. The results show that voters who benefit from a government healthcare program are more likely to vote for the party in government. This effect is driven largely by voters not affiliated to any party.

Chapter 3 tests one of the main implications of my argument: that when incumbents are concerned about their chances of reelection they would be more likely to favor non-discretionary forms of resource distribution in swing areas. I use data from a nationwide assessment of all local governments in Ghana on their compliance with budget allocation rules to test this prediction. The results show that local governments in districts with a swing history score significantly higher on their compliance with budget implementation rules than those without a swing history. Moreover, the magnitude of swing reinforces this effect: compliance with budget implementation rules is significantly higher in those districts where the size of the swing is larger.

Chapter 4 analyzes survey data to show how the electoral behavior of voters varies with politicians' resource distribution strategies. I show that voters, particularly swing voters, are significantly more likely to vote for incumbent politicians if they believe that the allocation of public resources by these politicians is fair, that is, non-discretionary. The results also show that among loyal voters of incumbent politicians, support for those politicians who are perceived to favor non-discretionary distributive strategies is slightly higher than those perceived to pursue largely discretionary distributive strategies. Chapter 5 concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of the findings.

I examine how the structure of the party system, specifically the structure of the opposition, influences government policy making in multi-party parliamentary democracies. In parliamentary countries a party or a coalition of parties backed by the majority of the legislature is considered to be the government, and the rest of the parties in the legislature are the opposition. In a parliamentary country, legislation needs to be supported by a legislative majority. Because of this, previous literature has examined how the ideology and the structure of the government influences policy making.

This dissertation contains two main parts. First, I propose that the government's strategic environment influences policy making. I show that when the opposition is unified, and there is a coalition government, government spending increases. Second, I explore long term strategic alliances between parties that cooperate in the opposition. I call these alliances stable coalitions, and I propose that they change the structure of the opposition.

In the first part, I show that when a coalition government faces the opposition, spending increases when the opposition is unified as opposed to when the opposition is fragmented. I argue that this is because the smaller party in the government coalition has leverage — it can join the unified opposition and therefore transform them into the new majority. I argue that in this case, when the small coalition partner is pivotal, the bigger coalition partner will pay them more in goods to ensure their continued membership, which will increase government spending overall. I provide evidence for this proposition through a cross-sectional time-series data analysis of 16 European Countries from 1970-2013.

In the second part, I focus on pre-electoral coalitions that stay allied in the long term. I refer to them as stable coalitions. I argue that because stable coalitions do not dissolve when their parties are in the opposition, it is necessary to examine these alliances in order to understand the government's strategic environment. First, I test two extant hypotheses using data from France: that pre-electoral coalitions form because the parties are ideologically close, and that pre-electoral coalitions form because the parties are electorally synergistic. I find that these propositions are true. In the following chapter however, I also find that the causality may run in the opposite direction, and parties that are in stable coalitions narrow their ideological differences and instruct their members to vote strategically. I argue that stable coalitions exist because the member parties can expand their support bases and thus increase their electoral success. Accordingly, stable coalitions are beneficial in the long run and allow parties in the opposition to pose a unified threat to the government.

Overall, I explore a previously understudied aspect of politics: the role of the opposition in policy making. I find that the party system, specifically competition in the party system, influences the government. Previous studies of policy making and representation are incomplete due to their failure to carefully consider how parties strategize in and out of government.