Political Turnover Negatively Affects the Quality of Public Services: A Replication

Sebastian Gallegos

No 39, I4R Discussion Paper Series from The Institute for Replication (I4R)

Abstract: The politically motivated replacement in local governments is a pervasive fact in our modern democracies. Whether it has causal effects on the quality of public services, such as education, is a critical question and yet understudied. This paper uses a regression discontinuity design (RDD) for close elections to replicate Akthari, Moreira and Trucco (2022) who find negative effects on the quality of public education in Brazil (.05-.08 standard deviations of lower test scores). I first reproduce these main results, finding minor computational differences that have no effect on the conclusions. I also show that the estimates for Brazil are in general robust to different specifications following Brodeur, Cook and Heyes (2020). Finally, I implement the same RDD framework now applied to Chilean administrative records to find null effects on test scores. Taken together, these results suggest that political turnover has weakly negative effects on service quality.

Keywords: Replication; Robustness; Political Turnover; Regression Discontinuity; Quality of Public Services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H75 H76 J45 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/272772/1/I4R-DP039.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Political Turnover Negatively Affects the Quality of Public Services: A Replication (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:39

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in I4R Discussion Paper Series from The Institute for Replication (I4R)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().