In this paper, we investigate the impact of political representation in Congress in Brazil on the local provision of public goods and services. Relying on a fixed effects model, plus the fact that the electoral system generates some random variation in the political representation across terms and municipalities, we find a positive and significant effect of political representation on health and school outcomes. For instance, in health, the results indicate that one additional seat in Congress representing a municipality decreases the share of low birth weight newborns by 0.06 percentage points. When looking at school outcomes, the share of schools with access to the Internet increases by 0.63 percentage points. Moreover, the results suggest that ‘pork-barrel’ politics is one potential mechanism explaining this improvement in the provision of public goods and services.

中文翻译：

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政治代表对公共产品和服务提供的影响

在本文中，我们调查了巴西国会中的政治代表对地方公共产品和服务提供的影响。依靠固定效应模型，再加上选举制度在不同时期和城市的政治代表中产生一些随机变化这一事实，我们发现政治代表对健康和学校成果有积极而显着的影响。例如，在健康方面，结果表明，代表一个市政当局在国会中增加一个席位会使低出生体重新生儿的比例降低 0.06 个百分点。从学校成绩来看，可以访问互联网的学校比例增加了 0.63 个百分点。而且，