The paper reassesses the way in which electoral rules influence the development of clientelistic ties between elected officials and their voters. It does so with a new original dataset on the allocation of funds from five different government programs in Romania between 2004 and 2011. Romania underwent an electoral reform in 2008 that moved the country from a classic closed-list proportional representation system to a system in which every candidate runs in individual districts allows us to directly observe any change in legislators’ behaviour in an environment that mimics a natural experiment. Given that before and after the electoral reform the members of the parliament represented counties we can observe how the allocation of funds to counties with representatives from the parties in government changes when these representatives are elected individually as opposed to on lists.
