The illicit beneficts of local party alignment in national elections

How do central politicians in young democracies secure electoral support at grass-roots level? I show that alignment with local governments is instrumental in swaying national elections via electoral fraud. Using a regression discontinuity design with Romanian local elections and a president impeachment referendum in 2012, I find higher referendum turnouts in localities aligned with the government coalition - the impeachment initiators. A variety of electoral forensics tests uncover abnormal vote count distributions across polling stations, consistent with null ballot stuffing and possibly vote buying. The alignment effect is driven by rural localities, those with weaker opposition party presence, and higher vote buying incidence in past elections. This illicit transfer from local to national government may explain the reverse clientelistic grants found in the intergovernmental transfers literature.