Political Turnover, Bureaucratic Turnover, and the Quality of Public Services

Abstract

While it is expected that parties taking office will bring high level officials to the government, less is known about what happens to lower level employees. In this paper, we study the effect of party turnover on the appointment of teachers, appointment of headmasters, and the quality of education provision in Brazil. Using a regression discontinuity design on close mayoral elections, we find that municipalities with a new party in office have higher turnover of headmasters and teachers the year after the election: 24 and 10 percentage points more positions are replaced, respectively. Party turnover also has real and persistent effects on education outcomes. In municipalities with turnover, test scores are 0.13 standard deviations lower and dropout rates are 37% higher. The decrease in performance persists three years after the election. The evidence suggests that the disruption of personnel at the school level is driving the decrease in students’ performance: headmasters are less experienced in their positions and teachers’ assessment of the headmaster is more negative, whereas teachers’ characteristics, students’ characteristics, or resources spent on education do not seem to change. Taken together, our results suggest that the disruption to the bureaucracy has a real cost for the quality of service provision.