Most Brazilians Don't Back Lotteries to Allocate Public Housing

🔍 Why Lotteries Are Considered

Lotteries are often proposed to allocate government benefits when demand outstrips supply: they can be simple, impartial, and can enable rigorous impact evaluations. Yet public acceptance of using lotteries for real-world beneficiary selection is not well understood.

🏙️ What This Study Looks At

This study examines public support for using a lottery to select recipients of newly built government housing units in Brazil.

🧩 How Support Was Measured

• A three-pronged, mixed-method design:
• Quasi-experimental analysis of an original survey of lottery applicants (winners vs. non-winners).
• In-depth interviews with applicants to probe perceptions of fairness and deservingness.
• A nationally oriented survey experiment presenting lotteries versus alternative selection methods to the general public.

📊 Key Findings

• Overall support for lotteries was limited: neither lottery participants nor the general public showed strong backing for using lotteries to allocate housing.
• Within the applicant pool, support was noticeably higher among winners than among non-winners, indicating self-interest shapes attitudes toward lotteries.
• Interviewed applicants frequently argued that lotteries fail to identify the most deserving beneficiaries, raising legitimacy concerns.
• In the general population experiment, lotteries were viewed as less just and less efficient compared with alternative beneficiary-selection methods.

⚖️ Why It Matters

Lotteries can be normatively attractive and useful for evaluating program impacts, but this research finds constrained popular support in a real policy context. Policymakers considering lotteries for oversubscribed programs should weigh procedural simplicity and evaluative value against perceptions of fairness and public legitimacy.