Three essays on local bureaucracies

Abstract

This thesis studies the composition, dynamics, and consequences of staffing decisions in local governments, using novel administrative data from Chilean municipalities. Across three essays, I examine how political cycles, partisanship, and descriptive representation shape employment in local bureaucracies and, in turn, affect state capacity and inclusion. The first essay introduces a new high-frequency employer–employee panel covering nearly all municipal workers in Chile between 2016 and 2025. Constructed from legally mandated transparency disclosures, the dataset harmonizes semi-structured payroll records into monthly job spells using record linkage and imputation methods. After presenting validation exercises, the paper illustrates the dataset’s value through descriptive evidence on political employment cycles, workforce turnover, overtime dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic, and wage differentials by worker qualifications, offering a granular view of local public administration. The second essay uses this panel to study the effects of political partisanship within the bureaucracy on state capacity. Exploiting mayoral coalition switches and variation in levels of partisanship, I estimate its impact on revenue collection using a stacked triple-differences design. Coalition switches in highpartisanship municipalities reduce per-capita revenues by 13 percent, with larger losses in municipalities able to adjust personnel more easily. These declines are driven by substantial workforce reshuffling: aligned partisans expand their employment while misaligned workers contract. The results highlight the economic costs of politically motivated staffing and the role of meritocratic safeguards in sustaining local state capacity. The third essay examines whether descriptive representation in political leadership promotes labor inclusion within the state. Focusing on Indigenous representation, I study how the election of Mapuche mayors affects the employment of Mapuche municipal workers. Using stacked event studies and Indigenous surname markers, I show that electing a Mapuche mayor increases the share of Mapuche employees by about two percentage points, with symmetric declines following the ousting of a Mapuche mayor. These changes are not explained by nepotism, but instead point to a representational mechanism that broadens access to municipal employment. Together, these essays show how political forces shape local bureaucracies, with implications for state capacity, equity, and representation in public employment.