Political Turnover, Bureaucratic Turnover, and the Quality of Public Services

Abstract

We study how political party turnover in mayoral elections in Brazil affects the provision of public education. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design for close elections, we find that municipalities with a new party in office have test scores that are 0.05-0.08 standard deviations lower than comparable municipalities with no change in the political party. Party turnover leads to a sharp increase in the replacement rate of headmasters and teachers in schools controlled by the municipality. In contrast, we show that turnover in the political party of the mayor does not impact the replacement rate of school personnel or student test scores for local (non-municipal) schools that are not controlled by the municipal government. These findings suggest that political turnover in Brazilian municipalities negatively impacts student outcomes through political discretion over the municipal education bureaucracy. Political turnover can adversely affect the quality of public service provision in environments where the bureaucracy is not shielded from the political process.

Political Parties Do Matter in U.S. Cities ... For Their Unfunded Pensions

“…12 A related literature uses local RD designs to study the effects of party turnover itself, with the primary outcome being patronage politics and public-office hiring (Akhtari, Moreira, and Trucco, 2017;Colonnelli, Prem, and Teseo, 2018). This literature is primarily focused on developing countries, since patronage politics has largely disappeared from U.S. local politics since the professionalization of municipal bureaucracies starting in the 1930s (Grindle, 2012), although a fascinating recent study by Ornaghi (2018) suggests it may have been prevalent well into the 1970s.…”

The Political Economy of Program Enforcement: Evidence from Brazil

“…For the purpose of our analysis, the key idea is that politically appointed principals may be indebted to the politicians who selected them, and as a result they may be more susceptible to political pressures. For example, Akhtari, Moreira and Trucco (2016) show that party turnover in municipal elections significantly increases the replacement of school principals.…”

Occupy Government: Democracy and the Dynamics of Personnel Decisions and Public Sector Performance

“…Figure 9 shows that they follow a similar pattern observed in the political appointee vs civil servant split partly because a large fraction of the bureaucratic jobs are performed by appointees, while most of the service-oriented occupations, such as teachers and nurses, are performed by civil servants. The disproportional hiring of party members to service-oriented occupations is a practice that could lower the quality of services offered to the local population (Akhtari, Moreira, and Trucco, 2016).…”

“…These papers look, among other things, at how public servants' behavior maps into the performance of public services and how internal policies may be framed to make the best of the conflicting interests faced by officials (Finan, Olken and Pande, 2015;Cameron, de Figueiredo and Lewis, 2016). For instance, Akhtari, Moreira and Trucco (2016) explore how political turnover in Brazil impacts the replacement rate of headmasters and teachers in schools controlled by the municipality, thereby negatively impacting the public education provision. Other recent papers study the selection of public servants and how political connections shape public personnel decisions (Dal Bó et al, 2017;Dal Bó, Finan, and Rossi, 2013;Deserran, 2018;Weaver, 2018;Fang et al, 2018).…”