Occupation, Gender, Race, and Policy Outcomes in Brazilian Municipal Politics

Politicians' identities and backgrounds have a profound impact on their policy preferences, proposals, and achievements. Race, gender, and occupation influence how policy-makers behave in office and what policies they prioritize. The representation of women, individuals of color, and those from non-lawyer and business leader backgrounds change policies to directly help members of marginalized communities, including through government spending. And these identities--such as gender and race, or gender and occupation--interact in profound ways to influence policy outcomes. For example, research has shown that the presence of women from occupations like health, education, and the service industry - working class jobs traditionally held by women - shapes policy outcomes of legislatures. These patterns are particularly important because occupation tends to vary such that women disproportionately hail from different occupational backgrounds than do men, with women of color’s occupations constrained more by gender than by race. We argue that politician’s race, gender, and occupational background work together to structure their priorities. In particular, we argue that people with backgrounds in jobs with high levels of gender segregation and specialized training and certifications that enhance gendered-occupational socialization. We focus on two career paths where women make up the majority of the workforce, are the primary beneficiaries of state policy in the area, and that require specialized courses of certification and training: education and healthcare. We posit that minorities, women, and black women with backgrounds in education and healthcare--more so than white, white-collar, men--are more likely to prioritize fundings for education and healthcare initiatives. Consequently they should allocate more of their budget to healthcare and education, focusing less on infrastructure and transportation. Leveraging the case of Brazil, a highly decentralized federalist country with 5,570 municipalities, we focus on municipal budget allocation. This decentralized governing structure means that municipalities control substantial revenue and spending and mayors exercise extensive control over budgets with only minimal oversight from city councils. Municipal governments also control a wide set of policies (including education, social services, and health care) that directly impact the lives of their residents. Combining a new coding of occupation with the gender and race of municipal candidates, we use both observational and causal techniques for examining the effect of occupation, gender, and race on policy outcomes. We show that gender, race, and occupational backgrounds intersect in important ways to shape mayoral budgeting priorities. Our research has important implications for understanding how policy-makers identities and backgrounds shape policy outcomes. It is not enough that voters have the ability to hold law-makers accountable at the polls, rather, our research shows that even mayors who compete in close elections and win by small margins are influenced by their own personal backgrounds.