Electoral punishment and creative accounting in mayors’ elections (2004-2016)

Abstract

The main purpose of this work is to measure the effect of "creative accounting" in mayoral election. We want to measure the effect of creative accounting judged by Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU) in elections. Our unit of analysis are the mayoral elections between 2004-2016. We look for agents with creative accounting judged by TCU, whether they hold public office or not. As control variables we used campaign finance, incumbent or not, party switching, population size and per capita income. Using a logistic regression, we try to estimate the effect of one or more independent variables in a dependent binary variable. Our results indicated that 35% of candidates responsible for creative accounting were elected. The model also indicates that between challenger and incumbent with creative accounting, incumbents have more chances to be reelected than challengers have to win.