Eligible Bachelors? How University Education Harms Performance by Mayors in Peru

• In Event: Civic Learning on Campus: Bringing Political Science In Mini-Conference I: Schools and Democracy: How Varieties of Education Matter for Citizenship

Abstract

While development policies have emphasized decentralization and good governance, access to university education has dramatically increased in the Global South. We explore the link between these trends by examining whether university expansion has improved the quality of local governance by getting better educated people into municipal politics. On one hand, better educated politicians could be more competent or less willing to be corrupt. On the other, this new class of politicians may lack the requisite connections to get things done or fail to represent their less educated electorate. Drawing on variation across cohorts in access to a university in the Peruvian province where a candidate was born, we leverage a difference-in-differences design to estimate the effects of politicians having access to university education on performance in office as well as their propensity to run for and win office. Our initial findings show that mayors in provinces with greater access to university education spend less of their budget and are less likely to obtain transfers and competitive funding for their municipalities. Further evidence suggests that these differences reflect these outsider candidates lacking political connection and being less willing to engage in corruption, rather than possessing different ideologies. Finally, voters are less likely to elect university-educated politicians, suggesting that they anticipate the limited benefits of this attribute for local governance.

Authors

• John Marshall, Columbia University

• Horacio Larreguy, ITAM

• Miguel Angel Carpio, Universidad de Piura