Skip to content Skip to navigation

The Emergence of Political Attitudes Among Bureaucrats: Evidence from Teachers in Brazil

Date: 
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 8:30am to 9:50am
Quarter: 
Fall 2020
Location: 
Virtual

Emmerich Davies, Assistant Professor of Education, Harvard University

The Emergence of Political Attitudes Among Bureaucrats: Evidence from Teachers in Brazil

Teachers and public sector bureaucrats are often seen as politically engaged and ideologically motivated vested interests that look to block education reform. At the same time, they are deeply embedded in low-income communities, with frequent connections to the parents and students they work with. What political attitudes do teachers have and how do they form them? Are they different from other professionals like them? And do their professional contexts shape their political attitudes or do certain individuals select into becoming teachers? In this talk, "The Emergence of Political Attitudes Among Bureaucrats: Evidence from Teachers in Brazil", Emmerich will present a pre-analysis plan for a survey to be launched in the last quarter of 2020 that seeks to understand how teachers' political attitudes emerge. The project relies on a regression discontinuity design using concurso scores to answer these questions.

About Emmerich Davies

Emmerich Davies is an assistant professor of international education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, and B.A. in economics and political science from Stanford University, and was a NAEd/Spencer dissertation fellow. His work focuses on the political economy of education and the effects of private education on citizen-state relations with a regional focus on South Asia. He has been published in Comparative Political Studies and Governance.