Choosing Institutions Locally: Determinants of Legislative Size in Brazil

Advisor: Claudio Ferraz

Who should choose local legislatives' number of seats, the federal government or local politicians? To answer this question I take advantage of a natural experiment in Brazil where legislators were given the chance to choose local legislative size given population caps. I estimate a structural discrete choice model where legislators may care for individual returns to reelection and to welfare considerations of representation when making the decision to vote for or against a change in seats. Results indicate legislators weigh 20% welfare and 80% reelection payoffs when choosing seats. With these results, I run some counterfactual analyses varying the population caps' function and the configuration of local political competition.