What is the difference between mayors and mayors regarding corruption in Brazil?

Responsible researcher: Adriano Valladão

Article title : WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A WOMAN WINS AN ELECTION? EVIDENCE FROM CLOSE RACES IN BRAZIL

Authors of the article : Fernanda Brollo and Ugo Troiano

Location of intervention : Brazil

Sample size : 161 municipalities

Sector : Gender

Type of intervention : Effect of gender on corruption

Variable of main interest : Corruption

Evaluation method: Discontinuous Regression

Policy Problem

There is a view that the politician's gender is important in the allocation of public spending, linking women to choices more focused on the social side such as health, child care and education. Similarly, there is also such an association between gender and corruption, where female leaders are associated with less corruption and bribery when compared to men. It is possible to study the effect of the politician's gender on corruption in Brazilian municipalities.

Assessment Context

Using information about the electoral dispute, administrative irregularities and patronage, it is possible to analyze whether the chance of being involved in cases of corruption is greater or lesser for women. The focus will be on the municipal administration of mayors, highlighting that they are directly elected by the majority of votes for 4-year terms with the possibility of re-election. It is also important to highlight that elections in municipalities with less than 200 thousand inhabitants only have a single round and may have a plurality of candidates, a potential difficulty in comparing the effect of gender. Furthermore, corruption is objectively measured by irregularities committed by the municipal government, that is, it does not depend on subjective indices such as the perception of corruption.

Intervention Details

Brazil, during the research period, had 5567 municipalities and the focus was on places where the 2000 and 2004 elections were marked by a dispute between candidates of the opposite gender. Given the problem of plurality of parties, only municipalities that had two candidates were selected, totaling 723 electoral disputes or 7% of the total. Some characteristics of the elected mayor were then collected, such as gender, education, party affiliation and political experience.

The information on corruption comes from audits of municipal governments chosen at random by the federal level since 2003 as part of an anti-corruption program. The program consists of sending auditors to municipalities to analyze how the local administration is spending money transferred by the federal government since 2001. The audit reports make it possible to classify irregularities into: (i) illegal purchasing processes (such as limiting competition , manipulating bids, bids won by irregular firms, among others); (ii) fraud; (iii) overpricing; and (iv) embezzlement of funds. After filtering, corruption data was obtained for 161 municipalities.

Public positions distributed throughout the term can be a means of exchange for the mayor to gain political support. Thus, patronage can be measured by temporary jobs offered by the municipal public administration, also including commissioned positions that do not clearly define the criteria and requirements of the vacancy. Temporary positions contrast with permanent and stable jobs obtained through public competition. Data for patronage are only available for the mandate lasting between 2005 and 2008 and totaling 381 municipalities.

Methodology Details

Measuring how a politician's gender affects possible cases of corruption is not simple. First, this effect would be influenced by unobservable characteristics of the municipality, such as its stance on accepting women, social preferences and demographic characteristics. Second, it would be necessary to compare the administrations of a female mayor with that of a male mayor under the same conditions to attribute the effect to gender and, in practice, only one of them is observed. In other words, it is not possible to know exactly whether or not certain decisions would be adopted if the mayor's gender changed, therefore, some hypothesis is necessary to compare the data and reach a conclusion.

It is assumed, then, that cities where women won the electoral contest by a small margin when running against a man are a good counterpoint to cities where the opposite happened (men winning against women by a small margin). This argument is justified since, in close disputes, the probability of victory would be the same for men and women and the elections would be decided by other random voters' factors and not by the candidate's gender. Therefore, the treatment group can be defined as the municipalities where a woman was elected in a dispute against someone of the opposite sex by a small margin and the control group when a man was elected under the same circumstances. Finally, it is highlighted again that the effect of the politician's gender on corruption is obtained when the margin of victory in the election was small.

Results

Using electoral data, corruption measurements and the comparison logic proposed above, it is possible to compare the probabilities of corruption between men and women and attribute this value strictly to gender. The results show that the probability of women being involved in cases of corruption is between 29 and 35 percentage points lower than that of men. The calculation is credible since audits carried out by the federal government are random and do not depend on the mayor's gender, that is, the difference in probability above is not due to a bias on the part of the federal government in potentially choosing more cities with male mayors than men. with women.

Another way to measure corruption would be through temporary positions, it was found that mayors hire 52% of the number of temporary jobs in the mayor's administration, on average over 4 years. Furthermore, the proportion between temporary and civil servant positions is 9% lower in city halls with a female mayor than with a male mayor. The dynamics of appointment to temporary positions in the last year of the mandate were also investigated, as this could more clearly mean an exchange to guarantee political support in the following election. If in the first year of office temporary hiring is similar between city halls headed by men and women, in the last year female mayors hire temporarily between 10 and 13 percentage points less than male mayors.

Public Policy Lessons

Just as the gender of politicians is associated with the allocation decisions of their management, the same happens with corruption. Analyzing the effects of mayors' gender in Brazilian municipalities shows that women are less likely to be involved in cases of corruption. Furthermore, another dimension that signals misconduct occurs via the hiring of temporary positions, occurring on a greater scale for men in the last year of their mandate when compared to women.

Reference

Brollo, Fernanda; Troiano, Ugo. “What happens when a woman wins an election? Evidence from close races in Brazil.” Journal of Development Economics, vol. 122, p. 28-45, 2016.