11:00 - 13:15
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Sandra Leon
Discussant/s:
Ignacio Jurado
Meeting Room H

Andrea Fumarola
Accountable to whom? Representative-voter congruence on views of representation

Guillermo Toral
Turnover: How electoral accountability disrupts the bureaucracy and service delivery

Ken Stiller, Giuseppe Spatafora
Parliament without Accountability? Electoral Party Platforms and Intra-Faction Coherence in the European Parliament

Olga Gasparyan
Devolution in Non-Democratic Regimes: Local Efficiency and Resource Allocation in Russian Cities
Turnover: How electoral accountability disrupts the bureaucracy and service delivery
Guillermo Toral
Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University

Electoral accountability is fundamental to representative democracy. Yet, it can also be costly for governance because it causes turnover among bureaucrats (not just elected officials) and disruptions in the delivery of public services. This paper advances a theory of political turnover as a process that, starting the moment election results are published, leads to bureaucratic shuffles and depresses service delivery. I demonstrate these turnover dynamics through a close-races regression discontinuity design, using administrative data on public employment and on healthcare service delivery in Brazilian municipalities. The results show that an electoral defeat of the incumbent causes increases in dismissals, hires, and resignations of bureaucrats, and declines in public service delivery in the months following the election. These findings draw attention to the political strategies of lame-duck politicians, and highlight the intense and consequential bureaucratic politics that follow elections.