https://github.com/umbertomig/legislature-size-welfare

Replication materials for "Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil."
https://github.com/umbertomig/legislature-size-welfare

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Replication materials for "Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil."

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/umbertomig/legislature-size-welfare
• Owner: umbertomig
• Created: 2021-06-11T18:30:00.000Z (over 3 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2023-08-26T20:33:23.000Z (about 1 year ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-08-02T06:03:48.809Z (3 months ago)
• Language: TeX
• Homepage:
• Size: 35 MB
• Stars: 2
• Watchers: 4
• Forks: 0
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md

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README

        
# Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil

This GitHub repository contains data and documented R code for ["Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil"](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/x97gf), authored by [Umberto Mignozzetti](http://umbertomig.com), [Gabriel Cepaluni](mailto:[email protected]), and [Danilo Freire](http://danilofreire.github.io). The paper is forthcoming at the [American Journal of Political Science](https://ajps.org/).

> **Abstract**: How does legislature size impact public service provision? Despite the importance of institutional design for democratic governance, the effect of 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 delivery. We argue that changes in bargaining costs depend on whether additional legislators share the executive's party affiliation: More opposition members reduce the equilibrium 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 rates. To explore possible mechanisms, we surveyed 174 former city 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: 

> Mignozzetti, U., Cepaluni, G., and Freire, D. 2022. "Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil", _SocArXiv_, URL: .

BibTeX entry:

```

@misc{mignozzetti2022legislature,

 author={Mignozzetti, Umberto and Cepaluni, Gabriel and Freire, Danilo},

 title={{Legislature Size and Welfare: Evidence from Brazil}},

 url={https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/x97gf},

 DOI={10.31235/osf.io/x97gf},

 publisher={SocArXiv},

 pages={1--29},

 year={2022},

 month={Jul}

}

```