Patronage in Education

This is a repository for the research paper ("Government through patronage: bargaining for education in decentralized Brazil")[https://galileukim.github.io/files/papers/patronage_education.pdf]. The objective of this paper is understanding how executive-legislative bargaining shapes the decision to engage in patronage, building on existing literature on coalition formation, patronage, and state capacity.

Leveraging administrative micro-data, as well as qualitative fieldwork, this paper argues that executives who face stronger opposition in governemnt are actually incentivized to engage in more patronage. This is because securing votes in the legislature requires bargaining for votes, and the less support the executive has in government, the more patronage it engages in.

Bargaining for votes, however, has negative downstream consequences for student learning. Combining standardized tests with indexes of turnover, the evidence suggests that turnover in staff induced by legislative bargaining leads to lower student test scores.

Repository Structure

The repo contains the following folders:

├───data
│   ├───clean
│   │   ├───censo_br
│   │   ├───censo_escolar
│   │   ├───censo_escolar_turnover
│   │   ├───finbra
│   │   ├───maps
│   │   ├───rais
│   │   ├───saeb
│   │   ├───spaece
│   │   ├───tse
│   │   └───worldbank
│   └───raw
│       ├───censo_br
│       ├───censo_escolar
│       ├───finbra
│       ├───rais
│       ├───saeb
│       ├───spaece
│       ├───test_data
│       ├───tse
│       └───worldbank
├───figures
│   ├───plots
│   └───results
├───paper
│   ├───plots
│   ├───results
│   ├───template
│   └───theory
├───presentation
└───source
    ├───data
    ├───descriptive
    ├───models
    └───tests

Note that the repository is structured around five main folders: (1) data, (2) figures, (3) paper, (4) presentation, and (5) source.

Data Sources

The data used in this folder is all publicly available. As of now, they are stored in my Dropbox, but are available upon request at [email protected].