Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil

Abstract

What is the effect of legislature size on public service provision? While the literature relates legislature size to representation and government expenditure, its implications for welfare remain understudied. In this paper, we investigate the effects of legislature size on welfare, exploiting exogenous changes in city-council size in Brazil between 2005 and 2008. We show that adding a legislator improves education and health care. However, the results prove true for the services that are believed to be highly salient to voters and are easiest to claim credit for. In this sense, education quality and preventive health care remain unaffected while primary school enrollment and infant mortality significantly improve. To investigate the mechanism, we surveyed former councilors and analyzed 346,553 bills proposed by municipalities in the period. This analysis largely corroborates our findings, showing that politicians prefer to provide private and local public goods. This paper has implications for the design of legislative institutions.

Pork is policy: Dissipative inclusion at the local level

“…It could occur that irrespective of the municipality's developmental needs, congress members might prefer to allocate local policies to places where they already have political connections, bypassing other more needy municipalities. This is consistent with Mignozzetti and Cepaluni (, p. 29) who claim “politicians prefer to improve services that can be traded by votes. Programmatic politics become less important as clienetelism represent the only equilibrium strategy for gathering votes.” The authors show that increasing the clientelistic supply in Brazil, which is associated with the size of city council, decreases infant mortality and increases educational enrollment at local level in Brazil.…”

The remoteness of democratic representation

“…In contrast to population, the impact of larger legislatures appears to be more decidedly positive. In Brazil, Mignozzetti and Cepaluni (2019) show that a larger number of seats is associated with a greater number of services valued by voters, such as school enrollment and treatments that reduce infant mortality. At the same time, less salient services remain unchanged and, contrary to Hypothesis 2, the representation of women sees no gains.…”

“…Evidence now shows that larger parliaments do not necessarily lead to higher government spending (Pettersson-Lidbom, 2012) and can be more attentive to voters’ demands (Mignozetti and Cepaluni, 2019). Yet, legislative representation suffers a poor rapport.…”

Alocação Das Emendas Parlamentares Individuais: Correção De Assimetria Em Saúde Ou Ganho Político?

“…Essa estratégia de sobrevivência política, conjugada à falta de coordenação na indicação dos recursos, resulta, muitas vezes, em "excesso" de repasses para um determinado município (MIGNOZZETTI;CEPALUNI, 2017). Entretanto, esse benefício reflete em resultados com níveis mais baixos que o esperado, nos indicadores sociais e econômicos (BERTHOLINI; PEREIRA; RENNÓ, 2018).…”

“…Os municípios com menor capacidade de coordenação institucional tendem a receber menor montante de EPIs (BERTHOLINI; PEREIRA; RENNÓ, 2018). Fato justificado pela Teoria da Escolha Pública, que indica que as políticas públicas beneficiam mais os grupos organizados da sociedade (HOLCOMBE, 2018;SALM, 2009); em que, independentemente das necessidades de desenvolvimento do município, os parlamentares preferem alocar recursos em lugares onde possuem conexões políticas, e têm maior capacidade de organização e coordenação, em detrimento dos municípios mais necessitados (MIGNOZZETTI; CEPALUNI, 2017;PEREIRA;RENNÓ, 2003).…”