Do black politicians matter? Political leadership and racial composition on top public sector positions

• Autor(a) principal: Fuente Estevan, Fernanda Gonçalves de La
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Lucena, Thiago Isaias Nóbrega de, Nakaguma, Marcos Yamada, Rabelo, Alexandre Marcos Mendes
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do FGV (FGV Repositório Digital)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/34666
• topic: Racial composition gap; Top-positions; Public sector; Economia; Negros - Política e governo; Setor público

The lack of non-white leadership is often pointed out as one of the potential drivers of the racial representation gap in top positions. This paper investigates the impact of electing a non-white mayor on the share of non-white managers in the Brazilian public sector. Focusing on local elections, we use a regression discontinuity design and novel dataset on candidates race to estimate the impact of electing a non-white mayor on a given municipality over the share of non-white municipal managers. We find that electing a non-white mayor is not associated with any significant increase in the share of non-white managers. We further perform a mechanisms analysis, that suggests that homogeneity across races among mayors’ networks can explain the absence of compositional impacts of the election non-white managers.