Geography, development, and power: Parliament leaders and local clientelism

While formal institutions are considered rather stable in Western countries, the same cannot be said of those in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In LAC, these institutions are superseded by nonformalized but deeply embedded practices—especially of political favoritism. Accordingly, this paper explores how members of parliament in LAC favor their birth regions by providing clientelistic goods and services to their constituents. The paper shows that the development of subnational regions is affected by their proximity to parliament leaders’ birthplaces. We collect data on 366 political leaders’ birth locations over 1992–2016 and construct a panel of approximately 183,000 subnational micro–regions across 45 LAC countries/autonomous territories. Our results show that incumbent parliament leaders favor regions near their birthplaces, as measured by night light emissions and World Bank aid. This favoritism is enabled by the patterns of formal institutional weakness, and de jure plus de facto influence given to the parliament by the particularly unstable constitutions of LAC countries.