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Electoral coalitions between ideologically incompatible parties-among other unconventional electoral strategies-may seem to threaten effective representation, signaling a breakdown of programmatic politics. However, this perspective overlooks parties' and voters' dynamic considerations. We propose and estimate a model of dynamic electoral competition in which a short-term ideology compromise, via an electoral coalition, offers opposition parties (and voters) the opportunity to remove an entrenched incumbent party from office, thus leveling the playing field in the future. This tradeoff provides a previously unrecognized rationale for coalition formation in elections. We take our model to data from Mexican municipal elections between 1995-2016 and show that coalitions between parties on opposite ends of the ideology spectrum have served as an instrument of democratic consolidation.

The logic behind redistribution theories is that incumbents target benefits to build and sustain linkages with voters. However, a recent literature shows that some benefits can have a countervailing effect in environments plagued by clientelism: by permanently boosting voters' incomes, irrevocable and durable benefits might reduce their dependence on incumbents. This article explains how parties strategically allocate these benefits when trading off the income effect relative to the standard electoral rewards of redistribution. The theory highlights a previously unstudied rationale to target opposition areas: to weaken voters' dependence on machines. The framework is tested with administrative data on the allocation of cisterns by state governments across Brazilian semi-arid municipalities, where clientelism is rampant. States favor areas governed by copartisans, but only where local clientelistic mobilization is weak. Where it is strong, states favor municipalities led by the opposition, while avoiding their own local strongholds.

The electoral success of the Right in poor nations is typically attributed to nonpolicy appeals such as clientelism. Candidate profiles are usually ignored because if voters value class-based descriptive representation, it should be the Left that uses it. In this article, we develop and test a novel theory of policy choice and candidate selection that defies this conventional wisdom: it is the Right that capitalizes on descriptive representation in high-poverty areas. The Right is only competitive in poor regions when it matches the Left's pro-poor policies. To credibly shift its position, it nominates candidates who are descriptively closer to the poor. Using a regression discontinuity design in Brazilian municipal elections, we show that Right-wing mayors spend less on the poor than Left-wing mayors only in low-poverty municipalities. In high-poverty municipalities, not only does the Right match the Left's policies, it also does so while nominating less educated candidates.Verification Materials: The materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DQTIR4. R ight-wing parties often win elections in developing nations where voters are overwhelmingly poor. Prevailing explanations for this puzzle typically focus on how they build a portfolio of electoral appeals such as clientelism (Murillo and Calvo 2019), ethnic mobilization (Huber 2017), positioning on "social" dimensions (Tavits and Potter 2015), or private provision of social services (Thachil 2014). The case of Brazil is similar: clientelism and personalistic politician-voter ties have been the primary explanation for why "conservative parties fare best electorally among relatively poor, less educated" voters (Mainwaring, Meneguello, and Power 2000), despite the fact that the Left is more likely to support redistributive policies.Not surprisingly, these explanations seldom focus on the descriptive profile of the candidates nominated by the Right. The literature on political behavior suggests that voters value descriptive representation (Carnes and Lupu 2016;Dal Bo et al. 2019), and are more likely to trust and feel included by politicians descriptively closer to them (Gay 2002;Hayes and Hibbing 2017;Lawless 2004). In turn, when politicians stress that "I am one of you," their common identity helps them to better understand the needs of voters (Carnes and Lupu 2015), and provides incentives for the betterment of the status of their shared social group (Shayo 2009). Thus, if there are electoral returns to class-based descriptive representation, it is natural to expect that Left-wing parties are the ones that capitalize on it in poor areas. Former Brazilian president Lula (2003-10) is a clear example. He often used his lack of education to emphasize his ability to succeed as a politician, and to implement redistributive policies, mentioning, for example, t...

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