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Variations in economic voting are commonly linked to the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable. In contrast, we argue that they may also stem from the incentives that voters have to cast an economic vote or not. In this paper, we follow Pacek and Radcliff (1995) and argue that voters who receive welfare benefits from anti-poverty programs should be insulated from swings in the national economy and thus have fewer incentives to cast a sociotropic vote. Evidence from the Mexican public opinion surveys conducted over the 1991-2004 period offers support this proposition. The findings suggest the rewards for investing in anti-poverty welfare programs may increase with program efficiency rather than politicization and that effective social safety nets are political ones as well. It also suggests that variations in economic voting might not reflect the weakness of accountability but its strength: voters are getting what they ask for. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on the effects of fiscal federalism suggest that the effect of decentralization on public good provision and fiscal restraint is largely determined by the social and political context in which the decentralizsation coccurs. This paper extends this work by showing that the outcome of decetralization is contingent upon the patterns of political competition that develop in the local political arena following decentralization. Specifically, the use of state resources to maintain clinetelist networks and low levels of budgetary discipline both predomidate in localities with either extremely high or low levels of electoral fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]