This repository contains the presentation slides of the paper "Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil", authored by Gabriel Cepaluni (São Paulo State University), Danilo Freire (University of Lincoln), and Umberto Mignozzetti (Emory University).
Abstract: How does legislature size impact public service provision? Despite the importance of institutional design for democratic governance, the effect of particular legislative features on citizen welfare remains little understood. In this paper, we use a formal model to show that increasing legislature size improves public goods provision. We argue that changes in bargaining costs depend on whether additional legislators share the Executive's party affiliation: More opposition members reduce the Executive's public goods provision, while more government-aligned members increase it. We test this theory by exploiting sharp discontinuities in city council size in Brazil. We show that an additional city councilor has a 91% chance of belonging to the mayoral coalition, and this significantly improves primary school enrollment and infant mortality measures. To explore possible mechanisms, we surveyed former councilors and analyzed 346,553 bills proposed between 2005 and 2008. This paper has implications for the design of representative institutions.
Keywords: legislature size; legislative politics; public goods provision; regression discontinuity design; Brazil
JEL Codes: H41; H80; I31; I38
You can cite the article as:
Cepaluni, G., Freire, D., and Mignozzetti, U. 2021. "Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil", SocArXiv, DOI: .
BibTeX entry:
@misc{cepaluni2021legislature,
title={{Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil}},
author={Cepaluni, Gabriel and Freire, Danilo and Mignozzetti, Umberto},
pages={1--29},
year={2021},
howpublished={\url{http://github.com/umbertomig/legislature-size-welfare}}
}
We used xaringan and the xaringanthemer R packages to create our presentation. You may find the slides here.