Occupy government: Democracy and the dynamics of personnel decisions and public finances

Klenio Barbosa and Fernando Ferreira

Journal of Public Economics, 2023, vol. 221, issue C

Abstract: This work investigates causes and consequences of patronage in Brazilian cities since the country’s re-democratization. It uses five election cycles and compares the hiring of winning and losing party members in close elections to causally estimate patronage. Cities increase their shares of civil servants affiliated with winning political coalitions by 3 percentage points during a mayoral term, and also increase their wage shares by 4 percentage points. Overall, patronage explains slightly more than 50% of the large increase in politically affiliated public employees since re-democratization. Moreover, we find that federal transfers and lack of accountability are important determinants of patronage.

Keywords: Democracy; Elections; Personnel decisions; Patronage; Accountability; Rent-Seeking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H70 J45 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272723000385
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:pubeco:v:221:y:2023:i:c:s0047272723000385

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104856

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().