种族自我分类、群体意识与公共就业代表性

中文摘要

本文考察巴西民选官员的种族自我分类如何影响公共部门招聘。我们聚焦于'错配'的白人候选人——即自我认同为白人、但不太可能被面部分类算法归类为白人的候选人——并利用市议会势均力敌的选举竞争，采用断点回归设计。这些候选人的微弱胜选使市级立法机构中非白人雇员的占比相对于平均水平下降约 20%。该效应出现在公共部门而非私营部门，且在临时工中更为明显——民选官员对这类岗位拥有更大的招聘裁量权。按反事实类型进行的分解表明，该效应由自我认同为白人的候选人之间的差异所驱动，而非源于非白人在任者被替代。我们的研究结果对倾向得分匹配、一种处理多席位选举中顺序统计量偏误的事前候选人选择策略，以及一系列替代设定均保持稳健。

Abstract

This paper examines how racial self-classification among elected officials influences public sector hiring in Brazil. We focus on misaligned white candidates — those who self-identify as white but are unlikely to be classified as such by facial classification algorithms — and exploit close electoral races for municipal councils using a regression discontinuity design. Narrow victories by these candidates reduce the share of nonwhite hires in municipal legislative offices by approximately 20% relative to the average. The effect appears in the public sector but not in the private sector, and is more pronounced among temporary workers, over whom elected officials have greater hiring discretion. A decomposition by counterfactual type suggests the effect is driven by differences among white-identified candidates rather than by the displacement of nonwhite officeholders. Our findings are robust to propensity score matching, an ex ante candidate selection strategy that addresses order-statistics bias in multi-member elections, and a range of alternative specifications.