Re-election of Peruvian subnational authorities: an analysis of its influence on district welfare indicators during the 2011-2014 municipal period.

Up until 2014, electoral laws in force in Peru allowed the indefinite reelection of sub-national authorities. However, a law forbidding immediate reelection of regional and local authorities was enacted in 2015. Within this context, this work aims to evaluate the effect of reelection on the performance of local authorities in Peru. We follow the competence approach and propose the hypothesis that reelection would positively impact the performance of local authorities: greater experience in office would make incumbent mayors more competent for the work. The competence approach is present in the political economy literature but has not been thoroughly studied empirically. We use a regression discontinuity approach to test the hypothesis, exploiting election results among re-elected and novice mayors with narrow voting margins. We measure the performance of local authorities in the main investment items of district mayors: education (through educational performance), health (through prevalence of acute diarrheal diseases), and infrastructure (through an index for economic activity). The main results suggest that there are no significant differences in the performance between districts with re-elected mayors and districts with novice mayors. These findings are not homogeneous in the case of educational variables, as there are positive but temporary effects in certain cases.