Worth What It Costs? A Study on the Relationship between the Institutional Capacity of the Brazilian Subnational Accounts Courts and the Quality of Public Policies of their Respective States

Abstract

Control is a central political act or moment of a broader cycle of democratic representation. To ensure that representatives, once at the head of their positions, conduct themselves in the "best interests of their constituencies", there must be effective and continuous instruments of control. In Brazil, the Federal Constitution gave the Audit Courts the challenge of controlling
their public accounts. But what is the relationship between strengthening public spending control – based on a greater institutional capacity of these control bodies – and the quality of public policies offered to citizens? This article
proposes to investigate it. To do so, the research design combines descriptive and multivariate statistics to analyze an original database prepared with information obtained from different sources. In particular, the institutional capacity of the Brazilian subnational Accounts Courts is operationalized based on the following variables: budget, personnel and accounts judged to be irregular. Nevertheless, the factorial analysis is used to define the indicators related to the quality of the public health and education policies of their respective States, in 2010. Among the variables analyzed, the preliminary results suggest that the
strengthening of the control of public expenditures is positively correlated with the quality of public policies offered to citizens.