Rules matter: determinants of bureaucratic control in the Bolsa Família Program

Abstract

The literature on the Bolsa Família Program has focused on issues such as the impact on poverty and inequality, the effects related to the electoral process and the role of conditionalities. However, the Bolsa Família Program is also associated with a problem of principal-agent relationship, because it requires the effective control of a set of rules for its operation. In the national literature, little has been produced on the effect of formal rules as instruments for political actors’ behavioral modeling. The proposal here is to explore the role of the federal and local bureaucracies in public policies management in a highly decentralized federation. In order to test how factors of policy, institutio­nal and geographical nature influence the intersectoral management of the program, the study uses multiple linear regression models for a comparative analysis between about 5.500 cities. The results show that variables such as political competition and regional location positively impact the quality of management. The study concludes that the effective application of rules was crucial to generate institutional learning among actors involved in the policy.