Electronic voting and Social Spending: The impact of enfranchisement on municipal public spending in Brazil

This article studies the effect of introducing electronic voting in Brazil on municipal level public spending. A theoretic, political economy model suggests that, by de facto enfranchising the poor, electronic voting increased social spending. This prediction is then empirically tested using as instrument the gradual introduction to electronic voting (EV), which affects voting enfranchisement without directly influencing public spending. We apply two different methodologies: a 2SLS regression and a differences-in-differences methodology to show that municipalities using EV spend more on health, education and public employment compared to the ones that did not, which confirmed the hypothesis presented in our model.