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

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.JEL Classification: D72, D73, H70, J45

Political Alignment and Bureaucratic Pay

“…Our second contribution pushes the research frontier beyond bureaucratic turnover (e.g. Iyer and Mani 2012;Akhtari, Moreira and Trucco 2017;Bach and Veit 2018) and politically aligned individuals' likelihood to be appointed to (specific) public sector jobs (Brollo, Forquesato and Gozzi 2017;Xu 2018;Barbosa and Ferreira 2019;Colonnelli, Teso and Prem 2019). We analyze personal financial implications of politician-bureaucrat preference (mis)alignment at the very top of the administrative hierarchy, thereby separating wage effects from other earnings effects (e.g., due to individuals achieving public sector employment).…”

“…Several recent studies show that supporters of the political party winning an election -including registered party members, election candidates and campaign donors -are significantly more likely to obtain a position as public employee and witness substantial income increases after the election. This appears to be the result of political favoritism whereby incumbent party leaders reward their supporters via well-paid positions in the public sector (Brollo, Forquesato and Gozzi 2017;Barbosa and Ferreira 2019;Colonnelli, Teso and Prem 2019). In this section, we perform a comparable empirical analysis to asses whether similar political favoritism is widespread in Norway.…”

“…Brollo, Forquesato and Gozzi (2017) andBarbosa and Ferreira (2019) instead use registered party members and look exclusively at the employment effects of partisan alignment rather than pay.…”

Patronage and Selection in Public Sector Organizations

“…underlines how patronage can lead workers to increase effort due to the prospects of promotion. 8 In a recent paper,Brollo et al (2017) conducted an analysis similar to ours, using aggregate data and a different set of individuals (registered party members in Brazil), which are matched to the employer-employee data we use by name, rather than tax identifiers. They find results similar to ours, but with a more limited analysis of the mechanisms behind the results.…”

Linkage Switches in Local Elections: Evidence From the Workers’ Party in Brazil

“…The most straightforward form of patronage involves allocating government jobs as a reward for partisan loyalists. I do not test for this here, but recent work suggests that PT mayors are—if anything—more likely to provide government jobs to declared partisans than mayors from other parties (Brollo, Forquesato, & Gozzi, 2018). However, this does not necessarily indicate patronage because PT mayors might have a programmatic interest in hiring workers who share their ideological commitments.…”