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

We study the causes and consequences of patronage in Brazilian cities since the country’s re-democratization. Our data consist of the universe of local public sector employees merged with their party affiliations, and a dynamic regression discontinuity design is applied to deal with the endogeneity of patronage. Elections have consequences for patronage, with winning political coalitions increasing their shares of public sector workers and wages by 3-4 percentage points during a mayoral term, and also occupying civil servant jobs to perform key service-oriented tasks in education and public health. This type of patronage accounts for more than half of the dramatic increase in public sector political employment since the Brazilian re-democratization. The political occupation of government jobs is not associated with ideology, though. Instead, lack of accountability and rent-seeking are the primary driving forces, while reliance on intergovernmental transfers only increases patronage for smaller cities. Finally, we estimate the long-term consequences of this political occupation for fiscal outcomes conditions and for the quality of education and health care services. More political occupation does not affect the size of local governments, but it changes the composition of expenditures and public workers: the hiring of politically connected workers crowds out, practically one-to-one, non-affiliated teachers and doctors. The increased political occupation in Brazilian cities resulted in negative long term outcomes for local citizens in the form of less years of formal schooling and higher mortality rates.