Plausibly Exogenous [845] - Political Accountability (05/13/2022)
LHS Variable
Political accountability
RHS Variable
Appointment mechanisms for choosing auditors
Source of Exogenous Variation
First, state-level audit courts (ACs) are composed of councilors who are selected by one of a variety of possible procedures: (a) appointed by the executive with few restrictions, (b) appointed by the legislature with few restrictions, (c) appointed by the executive where the nominated member must be a career bureaucrat, and (d) professional “substitute” auditors who are not appointed by the electoral branches. Second, annual audits of government agencies and subnational governments are assigned by random lottery to each of the councilors. These two institutional features create variation in the types of officials that are tasked with identifying and punishing malfeasance but remove the potential for confounding induced by strategic selection by the auditors of government actions to investigate.
- Hidalgo, Canello, and Lima-de-Oliveira (2016), “Can politicians police themselves? Natural experimental evidence from Brazil's audit courts”