Racial Self-Classification, Group Consciousness, and Public Employment Representation

Diogo Baerlocher and Rodrigo Schneider

No 2025-04, Working Papers from University of South Florida, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper examines how racial self-classification among elected officials influences public sector hiring in Brazil. We focus on misaligned white candidates - those who self-identify as white but are unlikely to be classified as such by facial classification algorithms - and exploit close electoral races for municipal councils using a regression discontinuity design. Narrow victories by these candidates reduce the share of nonwhite hires in municipal legislative offices by approximately 20% relative to the average. The effect appears in the public sector but not in the private sector, and is more pronounced among temporary workers, over whom elected officials have greater hiring discretion. A decomposition by counterfactual type suggests the effect is driven by differences among white-identified candidates rather than by the displacement of nonwhite officeholders. Our findings are robust to propensity score matching, an ex ante candidate selection strategy that addresses order-statistics bias in multi-member elections, and a range of alternative specifications.

Keywords: Racial classification; Political representation; Phenotypic discrimination; Public employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 H83 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04, Revised 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
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Published in Journal of Development Economics, 2026, vol. 181, C, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103755

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Journal Article: Racial self-classification, group consciousness, and public employment representation (2026)
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