Distribution of Political Rents and Voter Support: Some Evidence on Farm Subsidies and Electoral Performance of a Peasant Party in Poland

Abstract

Political parties can be assumed to engage in redistributive programmes in order to gain or maintain voter support. In this paper we look at what happens to support from the electorate once the rents that were previously endogenously created become exogenous and a party loses the possibility to target its core voters. Our example comes from Poland, where the national farm policy has been replaced by the Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). As a result, the Polish Peasant Party (PSL) had very limited possibility to decide on the size and allocation of financial transfers directed to farmers. Using a unique dataset on more than one million beneficiaries of CAP payments, we calculate various measures of inequality of rent distribution at the local level in 2014 and find that during the 2015 elections PSL performed relatively better in municipalities where the distribution of farm subsidies was more unequal.