The politics of government advertisement: evidence from Brazil

Advisor: Claudio Ferraz

Using an unique data set of central government expenditure on advertising in Brazil, we shed light on the behavior of public advertisers and on the relation between government ads and voting. In particular, we investigate political motivations behind the allocation of the advertisement budget by the federal government and its impacts on voting. Borrowing insights from the literature of distributive politics in Political Science, we first correlate ads money and votes for the government's party on the local level. Next, we exploit plausible exogenous variation on FM radio signal coverage to test if money spent on ads turn into votes for the government's party. Our findings show that although past presidential election outcomes predict where in the territory the government places ads, voters do not seem to be persuaded by those ads to favor the party in power.

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