Patronage, Elections and Constraints: Political Bureaucratic Cycles in Brazil

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries I

Abstract

A vast literature in political economy has studied political cycles in economic outcomes and economic policy tools (political business and political budget cycles, respectively). I propose a related concept, political bureaucratic cycles, by which to refer to politically-produced cycles in both bureaucratic inputs (public sector jobs) and bureaucratic outputs (public employees’ production). Jobs are one of the most important spending categories for governments around the world, and are one of the main distributive tools used by governments in low-capacity settings, where providing goods and services proves more challenging and harder to claim credit for.

The theory I propose has three main components. Building on the findings of political cycles, I argue that political bureaucratic cycles are stronger where politicians have the incentive and the ability to manipulate public employment. Next, I leverage the theoretical apparatus of the clientelism literature – which has surprisingly rarely been used in research on political business/budget cycles – to propose a theory of the political economy of patronage (or the clientelistic allocation of public jobs) around elections, deducing some observable implications. Finally, I build on recent work about the link between political and bureaucratic turnover, and propose a theory of why an electoral defeat for the incumbent amplifies political bureaucratic cycles, starting from the month of the election and not only when the government changes.

Empirically, I used a mixed-methods strategy for studying political bureaucratic cycles in Brazilian municipalities, an appropriate setting given its institutional design and the availability of rich datasets. The idea for this project and my hypotheses emerged from over 100 in-depth interviews with municipal politciains and bureaucrats in dozens of municipalities across 6 states in 3 regions of Brazil. To do these interviews and understand the local context, I have spent over 15 months doing research in the country. Interviews were critical also for probing mechanisms about how politicians’ incentives and constraints interact to generate political bureaucratic cycles in hiring, firing, and bureaucratic activity, and for guiding the design of the quantitative component.

For quantiative analyses, I exploit restricted-access, administrative, contract-level data on the universe of municipal employees between 2002 and 2016, as well as administrative monthly data on bureaucratic outputs in the healthcare sector. I leverage time-series cross-section regressions of over one million municipality-month observations, which together with the strict exogeneity of municipal elections help me identify the dynamics of political bureaucratic cycles. I then exploit a close-races regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of an electoral defeat for the mayor on political bureaucratic cycles in the six months following the election.

Together, the qualitative and quantitative findings throw light on the strategic use of public employment by politicians, and its implications for human welfare. In doing so, they contribute to the literatures on political cycles, the politics of clientelism, and bureaucratic politics. They also open a number of avanues for future research on the political economy of patronage, including the targetting of hiring and firing decisions, and the effectiveness of legal constraints.

Author

• Guillermo Toral, Massachusetts Institute of Technology