Is the Poor Better Represented by Larger Legislatures? Evidence from Brazil

• In Event: Representation and Candidate Selection

Abstract

Larger legislatures, all else equal, reduce the barriers to entry into politics. In environments plagued by elite capture of public resources, they could have countervailing effects: on the one hand, more politicians mean more competition for rent extraction and patronage spending, which might reduce the overall effort put into programmatic, redistributive policies. On the other hand, larger legislatures also increase the probability that candidates championing the interests of underrepresented groups are elected for office to influence policy in favor of their group. This paper provides evidence of the latter mechanism. I focuses on the implementation of a crop insurance policy targeted to poor households in municipalities of the Brazilian semi-arid. It employs a natural experiment where the federal government increased the cap for the number of seats in municipal councils preceding the 2012 election, for different population cutoffs. I use a regression discontinuity design in population size to show that an increase in the number of local representatives had a strong and positive effect on the local policy coverage. Elections results further show that municipalities with a larger council size elected more candidates that were poor small farmers, the precise demographic target of that policy, but only where this group was previously underrepresented. I interpret these results as evidence that larger legislate bodies, by reducing the cost of running for office, can disproportionately benefit underrepresented, non-elite groups of voters even in a highly clientelistic political environment.

Author

• Anderson Frey, University of Rochester