Extant literature concurs that fiscal transfers affect local democracy when they grant subnational governments nontax revenue. Yet there is nonetheless a mismatch between this concept and existing measures, which consider the whole transfers local governments receive, including both tax and nontax revenue. This article studies the Fondo Común Municipal (FCM), the most important intergovernmental grant in Chile, and provides a novel measure of nontax revenue. It uses this measure alongside the whole FCM transfer to test the rentier hypothesis. On the one hand, it shows that both measures increase the incumbent party vote share, although the effect of our measure is smaller. On the other hand, it finds that the FCM transfer has an impact on the probability of reelection and the competitiveness of elections, but this effect disappears when using our measure. Overall, the findings suggest that rents from transfers do not lead to strong electoral dominance in unitary states.

现有文献一致认为，财政转移支付在向地方政府提供非税收入时会影响地方民主。然而，这一概念与现有措施之间仍然存在不匹配，现有措施考虑了地方政府收到的全部转移支付，包括税收和非税收收入。本文研究了智利最重要的政府间拨款 Fondo Común Municipal (FCM)，并提供了一种新的非税收入衡量标准。它将这一措施与整个 FCM 转移一起使用来检验食利者假设。一方面，这表明这两项措施都增加了现任党的得票率，尽管我们的措施效果较小。另一方面，发现FCM转移对连任概率和选举竞争力有影响，但在使用我们的措施时这种影响消失了。总体而言，研究结果表明，转移租金不会在单一制国家中带来强大的选举主导地位。