District Systems to Support Equitable and High-Quality Teaching and Learning
Category: Policy, Politics, and Governance
Government employees often have policy beliefs that do not reflect those of the public. Civil servants are frequently more supportive of redistribution, which critics attribute to a state that socializes employees to be self-interested. But left-leaning citizens may instead self-select into public jobs. We test these two explanations using the case of Brazilian teachers. Leveraging selection rules where a meritocratic exam determines employment, we use a regression discontinuity design to compare those who become bureaucrats with those who tried but were unsuccessful. We find that teachers are significantly more left-leaning than the average citizen, but public employment has no further effect on political attitudes, and even makes teachers more conservative on some indicators. Comparing exam-takers, regardless of the outcome, to the Brazilian population, we find that right-leaning citizens simply do not apply. While bureaucrats' political attitudes are unrepresentative of the population, claims attributing their attitudes to state employment overlook self-selection.
Keywords
Brazil, Teacher Labor Markets, Teachers' Unions
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/vfqq-hs67
