Voting for Quality? The Impact of School Quality Information on Electoral Outcomes

Many developing countries fail to deliver high quality public goods and services to citizens, and empowering citizens with information has been proposed as a key intervention to improve accountability. We examine whether... [ view full abstract ]

Many developing countries fail to deliver high quality public goods and services to citizens, and empowering citizens with information has been proposed as a key intervention to improve accountability. We examine whether voters react to information about the quality of public schools. We exploit the introduction of a school-level accountability system in Brazil that provided an objective measure of school quality for citizens. We compare the change in the vote share of incumbent mayors at polling stations where citizens received information about the quality of the local school with results from polling stations where citizens did not receive such information. We find that, on average, the vote share of incumbent mayors increases when the information about school quality was released. Consistent with models that predict how voters update their beliefs based on the type of information, we find that vote shares increased by 2.15 percentage points for schools in the top 20% of the distribution of school quality while the vote share decreased by 1.6 percentage points for schools in the bottom 20% of the distribution.