Familial Political Ties and Public Transparency

• In Event: Assessing Democratic Brazil: Institutions, Traditional Politics and New Issues

Abstract

How do politicians with family political ties affect public transparency? Studies on the effects of political dynasties have flourished in political economy research, showing mixed findings. While researchers have explored many topics, the relationship between politicians with political kinship and public transparency remains under examined. Politicians often find transparency costly due to increased scrutiny and tend to resist them. I argue politicians from political lineages initially oppose transparency, fearing electoral consequences. On the other hand, once transparency is established, they rely on accumulated political capital to protect themselves from possible implications of scrutiny, realizing transparency is not a threat but an opportunity to signal modernization. Qualitative evidence reveals that leaders from a traditional political family wish to distance themselves from patronage and clientelism practices often associated with them. To test this argument, I use a regression discontinuity design in close elections, analyzing data from over 5,000 Brazilian municipalities in the 2016 elections and the 2014 and 2019 transparency evaluations. Preliminary results indicate that cities led by mayors with family political backgrounds have weaker information access regulations but improve the quality of responses to citizens' information requests. Moreover, this research introduces a novel method to identify politicians with traditional political backgrounds, combining automated news analysis of candidates with tools like the Google Search API, newspaper3k, and ensemble supervised learning algorithms. Future research directions include the development of additional causal identification strategies to further explore the variation in causal effects based on the margins of victory in local elections.

Author

• Virginia Rocha da Silva, European University Institute