Patronage Appointments in Brazil, 2011–2019

Brazil is widely regarded in the comparative politics literature as a country in which the tensions between bureaucrats and politicians illustrate the dilemmas of building coalitions, managing state-owned enterprises, and providing basic public services (Ames 2001; Bersch, Praça, and Taylor 2016; Schmitter 1971). Patronage appointments are at the heart of this tension. They are distributed according to different criteria, such as cementing governing coalitions or as part of a complex incentive scheme to make bureaucrats work according to presidential directives. In this chapter we study the politics of patronage appointments at the upper levels of Brazil’s federal public administration from 2011 to 2019.