Provisão pública de creches e oportunismo eleitoral

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effects of exposure to incentives for re-election by incumbent mayors on the public provision of enrollments in day care centers. Based on political agency theory, mayors apt to run for re-election are expected to have incentives to signalize to the electorate that they are candidates concerned about satisfying their preferences. Assuming that the public offering of private goods is a component of the electorate's preferences, especially the public offer of day-care centers, a quasi-experiment was conducted to test for opportunistic behavior in the provision of public enrollments in day care centers by mayors with re-election incentives. Using information contained in the Repositório de Dados Eleitorais of the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, municipalities whose mayors could run for the 2008 elections were selected as treatment group and the municipalities in which mayors were in second term were selected as control group. The empirical exercise was based on a discontinuous regression design approach (RDD) to verify if there is a mean difference between the growth rate of the provision of enrollments in public or private (subsidized by the municipalities) day care centers. The results indicated that there is no robust evidence of the presence of electoral opportunism in the provision of enrollments in day care centers, considering the vacancies offered in public and private (under a partnership with the local public power) day care centers. In addition, an empirical exercise was carried out to verify if there is an incentive to the public provision of day care centers under partisan alignment between incumbent mayor and the parties of the allied basis of the Federal Government in the National Congress and in the composition of the President's Cabinet. Again, no robust evidence was found to indicate effects of partisan alignment in the public provision of day care centers.