Political elites, ideology and public spending in small Brazilian cities

Abstract

The article analyzes Brazilian municipalities with less than 5 thousand inhabitants to determine if political ideology, taking the political party of the mayor as our indicator, exerted influence on the type of public expense. We separated between regulated and deregulated public policies and analyzed municipal expenditures in education, administration/planning, and public investments. Our research approach is quantitative, and analyses were performed with the panel data technique by the fixed effects method. The sample consisted of municipalities that provided their data to the MF/STN/FINBRA database between 2001 and 2012, totaling 14,039 observations. The results indicate that belonging to a left, center, or right-wing party is not a factor of differentiation over the predictor to estimate expenditures of administration / planning and education in small towns. However, public investment spending was higher in Brazilian municipalities with less than 5 thousand inhabitants when the governments were center and right-wing, compared to the left.