Political Turnover, Bureaucratic Turnover, and the Quality of Public Services

Abstract

We study how political turnover in mayoral elections in Brazil affects public service provision by local governments. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design for close elections, we find that municipalities with a new party in office experience upheavals in the municipal bureaucracy: new personnel are appointed across multiple service sectors, and at both managerial and non-managerial levels. In education, the increase in the replacement rate of personnel in schools controlled by the municipal government is accompanied by test scores that are 0.05–0.08 standard deviations lower. In contrast, turnover of the mayor’s party does not impact local (non-municipal) schools. These findings suggest that political turnover can adversely affect the quality of public services when the bureaucracy is not shielded from the political process. (JEL D72, D73, H75, H76, J45, O17)

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

“…This is a non-negligible effect given the increase of 20 percentage points in the share of individuals with more than 11 years of education driven by federal government policies to improve education attainment in Brazil (Ferreira, Bourguignon and Leite, 2003;Glewwe and Kassouf, 2012;Silveira at al., 2017). Such long term outcomes corroborate the short-term negative consequences of displacing school principals after municipal elections found in Akhtari, Moreira and Trucco (2020). The remaining columns reveal that estimates for adult literacy rate, and for the percentage of local population ages 15 and above who have less and more than 4 years of schooling, are not statistically different from zero.…”

“…The remaining differential wage share enjoyed by the winning party becomes entirely attributable to service-oriented by the year 12. The disproportional hiring of party members to service-oriented occupations is a practice that could lower the quality of services offered to the local population (Akhtari, Moreira, and Trucco, 2020).…”

Regression discontinuity design and its applications to Science of Science: A survey

“…Other studies use similar approaches but find smaller effects (Clark & Royer, 2013). In political science, Akhtari et al focus on the effect of political turnovers on the quality of public education (Akhtari et al, 2022). Using the sharp RDD, this study leverages closed elections (i.e., barely losing, and barely winning) as exogenous variations in political turnover, and finds that political turnover harms test scores for public schools due to the increase in the replacement rate.…”

Policy Uncertainty, Official Social Capital, and the Effective Corporate Tax Rate—Evidence From Chinese Firms

“…As a Chinese proverb says, “A new broom sweeps clean.” When local government officials take office, they are motivated to prove their competence by starting aggressive fiscal expansion activities and generating rapid economic growth ( Chen et al, 2005 ; Akhtari et al, 2022 ). From the perspective of local officials, the competition for promotion among officials generates short-term behavior.…”

“…As the government’s legal representatives, local officials play a crucial role in the region’s economic growth. Local governments can promote their economic goals through various means, such as promoting infrastructure construction, increasing public services, and adopting specific fiscal measures to affect the sustainable development of enterprises ( Earle and Gehlbach, 2015 ; Ma et al, 2018 ; He et al, 2019 ; Chen et al, 2021 ; Akhtari et al, 2022 ). Although this economic development mode dominated by government officials has created high economic growth, it has also brought many drawbacks.…”