To the Victor Belongs the Spoils? Party Membership and Public Sector Employment in Brazil

Fernanda Brollo (f.brollo@warwick.ac.uk) and Pedro Forquesato

No 2018_20, Working Papers, Department of Economics from University of São Paulo (FEA-USP)

Abstract: We analyze how political discretion affects the selection of government workers, using individual-level data on political party membership and matched employer-employee data on the universe of formal workers in Brazil. Exploiting close mayoral races, we find that winning an election leads to an increase of over 40% in the number of members of the winning party working in the municipal bureaucracy. Employment of members of the ruling party increases relatively more in senior positions, but also expands in lower-ranked jobs, suggesting that discretionary appointments are used both to influence policymaking and to reward supporters. We find that party members hired after their party is elected tend be of similar or even higher quality than members of the runner-up party, contrary to common perceptions that political appointees are less qualified. Moreover, the increased public employment of members of the ruling party is long-lasting, extending beyond the end of the mayoral term.

Keywords: Bureaucracy; patronage; political parties; public sector employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H70 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11-14
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.repec.eae.fea.usp.br/documentos/Brollo_Forquesato_Gozzi_20WP.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Working Paper: To the Victor Belongs the Spoils? Party Membership and Public Sector Employment in Brazil (2017)
Working Paper: To the Victor Belongs the Spoils? Party Membership and Public Sector Employment in Brazil (2017)
Working Paper: To the Victor Belongs the Spoils? Party Membership and Public Sector Employment in Brazil (2017)
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:spa:wpaper:2018wpecon20

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
cpgipe@usp.br

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers, Department of Economics from University of São Paulo (FEA-USP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pedro Garcia Duarte (pgduarte@usp.br this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).