Coordination Advantage: How Partisan Favoritism Persists Under Accountability Institutions

How can partisan favoritism persist when institutions have formal rules designed to prevent it? Existing scholarship emphasizes the electoral or elite payoffs of favoritism, but pays less attention to the processes that make partisan favoritism possible. We develop a theory of coordination advantage in which shared partisanship facilitates networks that link local and central officials. These networks provide privileged access to information and informal guidance, enabling local officials aligned with central officials to submit more and higher-quality grant applications without overtly violating formal rules. Using data on municipal grant requests and federal allocations in Brazil, we show that aligned mayors submit more proposals, receive more funding, and achieve greater compliance with technical standards than their unaligned counterparts. Original data on legislators' visits to municipalities and ministerial schedules show that partisan ties activate coordination. These findings suggest that partisan favoritism persists by exploiting partisan networks to navigate within institutional constraints.