Ministerial Typology and Political Appointments: Where and How Do Presidents Politicize the Bureaucracy?^*

Abstract

Does ministry type influence profiles in upper-level bureaucracy? To govern, presidents need to 01. maintain control over the content of public policies, 02. make political concessions that earn them enough parliamentary support to see those policies approved, and 03. build or keep in place the bureaucratic competencies necessary to implement them. We argue that the president makes key appointments according to the nature of the policies of each ministry and their centrality in the executive branch’s decision-making process. Employing cluster analysis, we propose an objective classification of ministries into four types: ‘coordination’, ‘redistribution’ (social policy and income), ‘regulation’, and ‘distribution’. We also identify their relationship with the profiles of those who have occupied positions in the middle and upper echelons of Brazil’s federal bureaucracy – what are referred to in Brazilian nomenclature as ‘DAS roles’ (in which ‘DAS’ stands for Direção e Assessoramento Superior) – in the period from 1999 to 2016. Our findings indicate that presidents choose to professionalize the bureaucracy of the ‘coordination’ and ‘redistribution’ ministries, to appoint partisans to the bureaucracy of the ‘distribution’ and ‘regulation’ ministries, and to allocate partisans of the coalition partners to the ministries controlled by those parties.

Presidentialism; appointments; bureaucracy; politicization; patronage

Presidents must choose their battles.

(Lewis, 2008, p. 73).

To be able to govern, presidents in multiparty contexts need to build political support to approve their policy agenda (AMORIM NETO, 2006), preserve the State’s capacity to implement quality public policy, avoid undermining those policies through patronage (Geddes, 1994), and minimize risks that their objectives will be sidetracked by political allies (MARTINEZ-GALLARDO and SCHLEITER, 2014). Although multiple actors are involved in shaping and implementing a policy agenda, the president holds (effective or perceived) responsibility for the success of a government and its capacity to respond to public demands for quality public policy.

The appointment of top-level bureaucrats are among the most important decisions that a president must make. These appointments largely determine presidential success because 01. they implement the president’s political control over his or her government’s decisions; 02. they are a mechanism to reward parties and legislators who support the government’s legislative agenda with power and influence; 03. they are primarily responsible for formulating and implementing effective policies. Ideally, presidents would appoint those who simultaneously meet all three objectives, but a limited talent pool and ‘realpolitik’ demand that their priorities be more carefully implemented by sector.

These three objectives that the bureaucracy can fulfill – policy control, patronage, and administrative capacity – create incentives and expectations about the prevailing profile of the appointments depending on the ministry. In multiparty regimes, presidents divide the executive branch into compartments and apply to each of them a primary – but not exclusive – appointment strategy (GEDDES, 1994). The president chooses where and how to prioritize control, competence, or political support².

In coalition governments, heterogeneity is almost the norm. Ministries are responsible for policy decisions and distributing resources that vary significantly from one another. The policies of each ministry are aimed at specific target audiences and render their unique influence on the decision-making process, the government’s popularity, and the electoral chances of the parties involved.

For example, while Finance and Planning are central to coordinating government activities and are present in most intersectoral policies (BATISTA, 2013; GAYLORD and RENNÓ, 2015), Local or National Integration have a narrower scope and more discretionary and territorially decentralized budgets, which can be directed towards electoral bases, as well as policies that don’t require coordination with other ministries (BATISTA, 2017).

There are ministries responsible for implementing policies with a broad reach, such as Health, while others regulate sectors that often place interest groups on opposing sides, such as Mines and Energy. This division of labor results in ministerial clusters whose appointees would have profiles derived, to some extent, from the three presidential strategies presented above.

Examples of potential choices about top-level bureaucracy profiles to be made based on ministerial policies³ frequently appear in the politics pages of newspapers. State superintendencies at entities such as Incra, or those linked to the Ministry of Cities (Local), or the Ministry of National Integration, come with an ability to influence political decisions at the local level, which makes them highly desired politically. To cite an example, it has been stated that ‘Congress members seek positions at Incra because each superintendency has the power to define how funds will be used and other agrarian questions – as well as the power to make decisions regarding the rural settlements established by Incra. If a Congressman has an ally in the driving seat, it makes it much easier for him to influence decisions that affect his electoral stronghold’.

Some government sectors, such as tax collection, are more impervious to party influence. On hearing that a general coordinator with no experience had been appointed to the head of one of the Federal Revenue’s audit agencies, permanent staff at the agency “[complained] that the appointment of the new general coordinator [...] has broken the tradition followed since the agency’s foundation [...] of having an auditor chosen from among agency staff at its head” (O GLOBO, 2019). The new RFB chief of intelligence remained in office for only four months. “The change came about in response to pressure from top staff [...] to fire [the appointee] since August. [...] auditors demanded a candidate with technical experience for the position” (ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO, 2019).

The appointment of top-level bureaucracy is a process defined by a combination of factors, including the characteristics and dimensions of the ministries’ bureaucracy and budget, the nature of the policies to be implemented, the institutional trajectory of the ministries, the interests of the president or the parties in pushing forward their policy agendas, and other factors.

To systematically analyze the relationship between ministry type and top-level bureaucracy’s profile, we propose a theoretical classification based on groupings of ministries that considers the types of policies they enact and the budgetary resources at their disposal. We argue that the upper-level bureaucracies’ profiles vary according to the four basic activities of the government: coordination, regulation, distribution, and redistribution. Depending on the centrality and visibility of the ministry in question, the president decides between professional or politicized bureaucracies - with a bias favorable to his/her party or allies.

We expect that the bodies that make up the government’s decision-making core, as they are priorities, will present a more professional bureaucracy. Conversely, the president will exert more political control over the ministries that are more susceptible to variations due to ideological preferences and that are visible to the national electorate, such as policies related to social inclusion and reduction of inequalities. The allocation of top-level management positions to allied parties is nearly uniform across different types of ministries. It is stronger in ministries controlled by coalition partners, which are mainly distribution ministries.

To analyze the compartmentalization strategies implemented by presidents, we consider four characteristics: 01. the proportion of top-level bureaucrats coming from federal career paths – i.e., whose entry into the public sector was meritocratic; 02. the percentage of appointees affiliated to political parties. Among party appointees, we specifically consider: 03. appointees affiliated to the president’s party; and 04. appointments of coalition party-members. We expect that the top-level bureaucracy’s profiles will vary according to the type of ministry. This is based on the argument that the characteristics of public policy influence politics because they affect the expectations of actors, the structure of conflicts, and political debates (Lowi, 1964).

This article contributes to the understanding of the appointment patterns of the federal bureaucracy in three ways. First, we test the classic argument that public policies influence political strategies. This relationship has not yet been tested to explain the association between thematic areas of State intervention and bureaucratic profiles. Second, we propose a ministerial typology that is theoretically grounded and based on objective characteristics of the organizations, and that improves replicability and the possibility of comparisons in different contexts. Finally, the methodological approach enhances understanding of the bureaucracy’s appointment strategies by exploring the variation in time between thematic areas and types of clientele involved.

In the next section, we discuss the theory and the proposed argument. In the third section, we describe the methods and data, and in the fourth section, we cover the results. In conclusion, we summarize the argument and the main contributions of this article.

Presidents and the composition of the bureaucracy

At the beginning of their terms, presidents need to select top-level bureaucrats according to their preferences but are constrained by the political concessions inherent in the process of forming the government. What criteria should they follow to fill these positions? What is the best bureaucratic profile to maximize a president’s success?

A frequent solution is to appoint top policymaking positions based on the criteria suggested by Weber for career bureaucracies ([1947] 2013): that is specialized professionals with technical knowledge of the activities to be performed and with some temporal stability to enable the formulation and implementation of decisions. Presidents concerned with policy outcomes should make appointments based on merit and give priority to technical competencies.

Rauch and Evans (2000) argue that even in high-ranking positions, the fact that those picked have gone through competitive selection processes tends to make them, on average, better than those appointed from the private sector. Stability in a given role leads to the development of skills and accumulation of knowledge for work performance (LEWIS, 2008). Much of the recent discussion on State capacities, the quality of government or governance, involves to some extent the professionalization of bureaucracy – including top and middle-level bureaucrats – as a condition for a quality public policy (CÁrdenas, 2010; Evans and Rauch, 1999; Fukuyama, 2013; Huber and McCarty, 2004; Peters and Pierre, 2004; Rauch and Evans, 2000).

From this perspective, the development of quality public policies is the parameter for evaluating presidential decisions regarding the composition of the bureaucracy. But creating quality public policies is not the president’s only motivation. Political ambitions encourage presidents to align the content of public policies with their political objectives. One of the president’s strategies to control his or her government’s public policy decisions is to politicize the bureaucracy by appointing people he or she trusts (Bonvecchi, 2014; Lewis, 2008; Moe, 1985; Pereira et al., 2017; Rudalevige and Lewis, 2005).

Presidents may also politicize public policy development through patronage and distribute positions to expand party support or co-opt interest groups. It is assumed that this use of patronage tends to have a deleterious effect on the quality of public policies because the criteria of merit and the respective technical skills required become less relevant (Hollibaugh Jr, Horton and LEWIS, 2014; Lewis, 2009; Praça, Freitas and Hoepers, 2011).

The three motives mentioned above are all used in practice but with differing potential emphasis depending on policy area. Faced with the dilemma between building bureaucratic capacities, exerting control over policy development and implementation, and distributing positions to build political support, the president establishes priorities with differing political and meritocratic criteria depending on the government sector.

The result is a ‘compartmentalized’ government: some areas have a more professional bureaucracy, while in others, there are more political appointees and allies. The sectors most relevant to presidential success are protected from patronage, and more peripheral sectors are leveraged for party support. In other words, there are sectors with less politicization and greater bureaucratic capacity, the so-called ‘islands of excellence’, and there are more politicized sectors with less bureaucratic capacity (Bersch, PRAÇA and TAYLOR, 2017; Evans, 1995, 1979; Geddes, 1994; Nunes, 1997).

Bersch, Praça, and Taylor (2017) have demonstrated that federal agencies present significant differences in terms of bureaucratic capacity and decision-making autonomy. Our contribution addresses how differences in appointment patterns relate to the nature of policies and the political constraints of multiparty presidentialism. We propose a new classification for the different sectors of government, and we identify the reasons for differences in the appointment patterns between these sectors. In other words, we describe the variations in bureaucratic profiles between the ministries and why they exist.

Presidents, coalitions, and the bureaucracy

In Brazilian presidentialism, as in many Latin American presidential systems, the formation of coalitions is necessary for the president to rule with a legislative majority. Bargaining leadership positions is a tried and true method for forming those coalitions and a practice that generates a set of specific incentives.

Presidents in shared governments contend with demands for policy control and patronage within their party and among coalition partners. Accordingly, there are three distinctive candidate profiles in top-level bureaucracy: 01. career public servants, for building bureaucratic capacities; 02. members of the president’s party, for aligning/monitoring public policies and rewarding supporters; 03. coalition party-members, for increasing the influence of these parties on policies and rewarding political support.

The president decides the profile of his/her appointees based on the structural characteristics of government bodies, mainly 01. the relevance of the body in question within the Executive’s decision-making process, and 02. the volume of budgetary resources that said body controls. Lowi (2015, 1972, 1964) argued that the type of public policy determines the corresponding political arena. The characteristics of public policy shape politics because they influence expectations, political exchange, and the structure of the conflict between actors. In our formulation, ministries are unevenly relevant in the Executive’s decision-making process and in controlling the budget. The objective is to propose a classification of ministries based on objective criteria and to explain why some agencies are more politicized. We are introducing a taxonomy of policy areas to better understand the functioning of politics in the federal government.

Different criteria explain the differences between governmental agencies. For North America, Lewis (2008) considers the centrality of agencies in the president’s agenda and the ideological positioning of the bureaucracy linked to them (Lewis, 2008). Escobar-Lemon and Taylor-Robinson (2005) use a prestige scale to rank ministries in Latin America. For Brazil, Abranches (1988) differentiates between coordination ministries and clientele ministries. More recent works further refine the classification with typologies that combine criteria such as budget, the number of appointment positions, nature of policies, and others (Batista, 2017; Mauerberg JR, 2016). Palotti and Cavalcanti (2018) present a classification by groups of ministries based on these same indicators.

Our goal is to propose a typology combining two dimensions: the relevance of ministries for policy formulation and the volume of budget resources. Some ministries are essential for the development of the Executive’s policies. This is the case mainly with the Ministry of Finance, responsible for one of the main government policy areas: the economy. Finance typically has the status of ‘super ministry’ because it also coordinates, formally or informally, many of the policies initiated in other ministries. Other ministries are important to policymaking dimension and control significant budgets. These ministries are generally responsible for high-profile policies, such as social policies. There are less relevant ministries in proposing policies, but which have the power to allocate budgetary resources throughout the country and generate high electoral returns. These are generally the ministries responsible for public works, such as the Ministry of National Integration. Finally, there are ministries whose policies have less electoral relevance and smaller budgets. The contribution of these ministries to the governmental decision-making process is to regulate services or activities, such as the Ministry of Communications or the Ministry of the Environment.

The diverse combinations between the two main activities of the ministries –formulating public policies (through legislative innovations) and executing the budget –generate specific ministerial clusters. These types of ministries are ‘coordination’, ‘redistribution’ (social policy and income), ‘distribution’, and ‘regulation’.

‘Coordination’ ministries are highly important in formulating policy, but they do not oversee large budgets. ‘Redistribution’ ministries are divided between those that steer social policies and those that control social security and labor market policies. The first group plays an important role in the policy design process and controls significant budgets. The second group manages a large budget, but has little discretion in execution, and is less active in formulating new policies. ‘Distribution’ ministries are peripheral to the policymaking process but have a large budget, mainly discretionary, which can be leveraged for electoral gains. Finally, ‘regulation’ ministries are not central to the formulation of policies, nor do they have large budgets, but they appeal to specific interest groups due to their control over the regulation of sectors of the economy or society.

The ministry type creates demand for a specific profile of top-level bureaucrats. Coordination ministries are the ministries responsible for elaborating the rules of the game, or the rules about the rules; they constitute the core of government policy design and are not burdened with specific interest groups since they do not control resources that are relevant to interest groups. Because they control complex and important decisions for the success of the government, they require a predominantly technical profile to achieve their objectives. For these reasons, we expect that these ministries will present greater meritocratic recruitment and a less politicized top-level bureaucracy.

H1: Coordination ministries present higher recruitment of public servants and lower recruitment of party members.

Regulatory and distribution ministries are ministries that target specific clientele or interest groups. In the case of distributive policy, ministries play a marginal role in public policy design but distribute larger, discretionary budgets with a more concentrated geographical impact, making them more visible to voters. They allocate resources to states or municipalities, usually for public works projects (Berry, Burden and Howell, 2010; Hudak, 2014; Kriner and Reeves, 2015; Lowi, 1972).

Regulation ministries are responsible for formulating rules that can pit interest groups against each other and are prized for their relationship with economic interest groups. Given the proximity of the distribution and regulation ministries to specific interest groups, especially in economic terms, we expect them to be more open to the recruitment of personnel from the private sector.

H2: Distribution and regulation ministries present less recruitment of public servants.

Redistribution ministries control on-the-ground public policies and are important for policy formulation and in the allocation of expenditures. The policies developed are salient for voters as well as ideologically divisive. Policies that redistribute income divide society into large groups or social classes (Lowi, 2015, 1964), and that is why they antagonize parties on the left and the right. Lowi (2015, 1964) calls these ‘partisan policies’. Politicians with expectations of directing these policies will appoint fellow party members, and, in these ministries, a greater partisan appointment is expected for purposes of political control.

H3: Redistribution ministries present more partisan recruitment from the president’s party for purposes of policy control.

The expectation for coalition partners is that the allocation of positions to their party-members is less related to the content of public policies and more associated with the political bargaining needed to garner legislative support for the government. We expect coalition party members to be allocated more evenly across different types of ministries, and most frequently in ministries controlled by coalition partners.

H4: Ministries controlled by coalition partners present more partisan recruitment from their party in order to build political support.

The greatest political aspiration is found mainly in the top-ranking positions, although it is also exhibited at intermediate levels. For this reason, we have grouped the bureaucracy positions into a middle and an upper echelon. Another potentially important factor is presidential popularity. More popular presidents can leverage political capital and appoint their own people despite party objections. We also included the electoral cycle in the analysis, due to the potential influence of officials entering and exiting their posts, as candidates or campaign workers. Finally, we created a control variable for each president. The next section presents the case, the data and variables, and then the results.

Case, data and variables

We analyze the relationship between the types of ministries and key appointee profiles based on the analysis of Senior Management and Advisory (DAS)⁴ roles, which constitute the main positions of administrative power in the federal bureaucracy. We have grouped the six hierarchical levels into DAS positions at the middle echelon (level 01 to 04), and the upper echelon (levels 05 and 06).

The upper echelon has greater administrative power and more frequent interaction with the political arena. These mostly comprise secretaries and directors of federal bodies, foundations, and autonomous organizations⁵. Sitting just below the minister and the junior minister, it is the upper echelon that sets in motion (proposals for) public policies and is decisive in organizing the policy agenda in each ministry. The middle echelon has varying levels of decision-making power, depending on the activities in each body. Level 04, for example, may be responsible for ‘ordering expenditure’ in the ministry, or ‘regulating contracts’. It is a position of great administrative and political relevance and is highly sought after. In general, however, the middle echelon performs essentially administrative activities with decreasing importance as we move down the scale.

The upper echelon represents, on average, 6% of posts – approximately 1,300 appointments. At all levels, the choices are discretionary, but at levels 05 and 06, there are no limits to appointing people from the private sector. In the others, since 2005, there have been minimum quotas for people linked to the public sector, ranging from 50% to 75% (Figure 01)⁶.

Figure 01
Average percentage of DAS positions by hierarchical level and main responsibilities (1999-2017)

Note: DAS (Direção e Assessoramento Superior) - Senior Management and Advisory.

Our analysis covers the administrations of four presidents over six terms, from 1999 to 2016⁷. The primary independent variable is the type of ministry. To build the typology, we used four pieces of information: two related to the importance⁸ of the ministry in the formulation of policies and two associated with the importance of ministries in the execution of the annual budget.

The first measure is the structural and functional differentiation of the ministries, which indicates the complexity and degree of specialization of the agency (Inácio and Llanos, 2016; Moe, 1985). We use as a proxy the number of secretariats and directors of each portfolio, defined by the number assigned to them, of DAS 05 and 06. Although there is no exact equivalence, these two levels of positions, if excluding advisory positions, usually indicate the existence of a relevant administrative unit within the ministry. The second measure of centrality in the policy formulation process is the number of policies in which the ministry participates each year. This measure, proposed by Batista (2017), is based on the explanatory memoranda accompanying the Executive’s legislative initiatives submitted to Congress. Taken together, structural differentiation (specialization) and the number of policies that the ministry formulates (activism) indicate the importance of the ministry in the formulation of policies.

The second dimension of importance is the ministry budget. We separate the total budget – measure 03 – from the investment budget – measure 04⁹. The total budget includes all resources – mandatory and discretionary – controlled by the ministry. The investment budget is the portion of the annual resources whose execution is discretionary, freely applicable, and which can be more easily oriented towards electoral purposes.

To identify the groups of ministries based on the averages of these variables, we used the K-means cluster analysis technique. The algorithm classifies the observations into groups so that the observations in a given group are as similar as possible (intra-class similarity), and observations from different groups are as dissimilar as possible (inter-class dissimilarity). We use the Hartigan-Wong algorithm, which mobilizes the sum of the square of the Euclidean distances between the observations and the centroid as a measure of intra-cluster variation (KASSAMBARA, 2017).

To create a more accurate description of the presidents’ choices, we propose four specifications for the top-level bureaucracy profile – our dependent variable. The first is the proportion of appointed federal civil servants. This specification defines the portion of appointees that have already undergone competitive and meritocratic selection. Although federal civil servants are often chosen based on elective or partisan affinities between them and their superiors, it is reasonable to assume that, on average, having civil servants that are already part of federal careers means more familiarity with administrative protocols and the bureaucracy, which is valuable institutional knowledge that is both time-consuming and costly¹⁰ to obtain.

The second specification evaluates the degree of partisan appointment by analyzing the proportion of party members in the ministry. We identified appointees from the public and private sectors who were formally affiliated with a political party at the time of their selection. The two additional dependent variable specifications refer to the partisan affiliation of the appointee and detail the origin of politicization. The first measure calculates the proportion of appointees formally affiliated with the president’s party in the year of appointment to the post. The second measure calculates the percentage of appointees affiliated to coalition parties.

To create the data, we cross-referenced information on members of political parties, made available by the Superior Electoral Court, and DAS role occupants extracted from the SIAPE/MPDG system. For reasons already mentioned, in all the specifications of the dependent variable, we present the results separately for those appointed at the upper (DAS 05 and 06) and middle echelons (DAS 01 to 04).

As control variables, we use the president’s popularity, measured as the percentage of positive ratings (Carlin et al., 2016). The second control variable is the classification of the minister, whether a member of the president’s party, a coalition partner or non-partisan (BATISTA, 2018). We also include fixed effects for presidents and the electoral cycle, measured as the number of years remaining until the next presidential election. All of the analyses use the ordinary least squares regression model¹¹. The next sections present the results.

The different uses of ministries: building a typology

The proposed typology adopts deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive because it conceptualizes groups of ministries from the theoretical discussion on how policy areas affect the expectations and strategies of political agents. Ministerial clusters are expected to reflect public policies that have common attributes. The typology is also inductive because it uses a grouping technique – cluster analysis – to identify groups of ministries based on observation. The dimensions of the ministries identified as important are related to the role of the ministry in formulating policies and allocating the budget.

Figure 02 in the left panel shows the structural differentiation. The points are the average for the period, and the vertical bars are the standard deviation. The ministries with the greatest structural differentiation are Planning, Education, Justice, Health, and Finance. Ministries that have less structural differentiation are Communications, Fisheries, Agrarian Development, and Welfare. The panel on the right shows the number of policies in which the ministry participates. The points represent the average annual number of legislative initiatives by the ministry in the period considered, and the bars represent the standard deviation¹². The ministries most central to the creation of legislation are Planning, Finance, and Justice, which also present the greatest structural differentiation. Ministries converge on the two variables that measure their relative importance in the Executive’s decision-making process.

Figure 02
Importance of ministries, policy making

The Ministry of Planning is responsible for governmental coordination of the budget. It allocates budget funds across other ministries and monitors the annual goals of the programs. For this reason, the ministry has high structural differentiation and an important role in the creation of legislation, mainly in partnership with other thematic ministries. The Ministry of Finance formulates the guidelines for economic policy – always an administration’s priority – and deals with broad-ranging topics such as fiscal policies, tax and tax exemptions, and incentives for the productive sectors and others. Without budgetary resources, it is not possible to execute most public policies, thus making the participation – and endorsement – of the Ministry of Finance indispensable in legislative proposals.

Among the ministries with less centrality in formulating, the Executive’s legislative agenda are Fishery, Tourism, Culture, and Communications. Each one is responsible for well-defined areas of policies that have activities related to the regulation of specific areas, hence the reduced legislative production. Figure 02 shows the importance of ministries in the policymaking dimension. However, ministries that are not important in this dimension may be highlighted in other dimensions, since in addition to the formulation of policies, it is also necessary to implement them.

Figure 03 depicts the importance of ministries in terms of the average annual volume of authorized budget resources (log-transformed). Concerning the federal government’s total budget, the most important ministries are the Ministries of Social Security, Health, Defense, and Education. Although they receive a large portion of the general budget, the amount of discretionary funds is relatively small. The Ministry of Social Security controls the payment of pensions and presents the biggest constitutional restriction on spending. Almost all of the funds are earmarked. Health and Education have constitutional and legal obligations with federal transfers to states and municipalities, due to the decentralized federative arrangement in the implementation of health and education policies. Ministries with smaller total budgets include Fishery, Culture, Sports, and Tourism.

Figure 03
Importance of ministries, budget allocation

The investment budget of the federal government should also be considered in evaluating ministerial importance. This section of the budget is more susceptible to political interference. The panel on the right shows the distribution of ministries in terms of the investment budget, an allocation of funds that generate a specific set of political expectations.

In terms of the investment budget, the most important ministries are Transport, Local, and Health. Among the less important ministries are Planning, Labor, and Mines and Energy. Two of the three most important ministries according to this criterion do not have a prominent position with the other indicators, and one of the three least relevant – Planning – is one of the most important in terms of policy formulation. The Ministry of Labor, which is among the least important in allocating investment budgets, manages essential public policy. This combinational variance confirms the notion that ministries fulfill functions and roles with highly diverse scope and relevance; clustering is an attempt to group them and offers a broad overview.

Considering the average values of the four variables presented, the analysis suggested five clusters (Figure 04). This solution maximizes both the similarity of the observations in each group and the differentiation between the different groups. The percentage of the original variance explained by the five-cluster solution is 77.2%. That is, the solution achieved a reduction in the sum of the squares of 77.2% in relation to the original distribution without the grouping.

Figure 04
Ministry groups (cluster analysis)

After extracting the groups, it is necessary to conceptualize them. We start from the theoretically based expectation of groups of ministries responsible for government coordination, redistributive policy, distributive policy, and regulatory policy. We then proceeded to interpret the classification of ministries in groups (Kassambara, 2017). To represent the clusters, the graph uses factor analysis and reduces the four variables in two dimensions. Dim1 is the dimension most strongly composed of the variables of policy formulation, and dim2 is the dimension most strongly composed of the budget allocation variables. Each cluster results from the combination of the two dimensions.

Cluster 04, which we classify as ‘coordination’, consists of Planning and Finance. Both are part of the government core, and, in addition to formulating their own policies, they coordinate the activities of the other ministries through budgetary and financial control. This role of the ministries is evidenced by their centrality in the legislative formulation (dim1) and less relevance in budgetary terms (dim2).

Clusters 02 (Social Security and Labor) and 03 (Health, Education, Social Development, and Justice) are composed of ministries with predominantly redistributive policies. They are ministries of medium to high budget allocation and medium importance for policy formulation. Such ministries formulate policies that are important to the government, but which normally divide society into two large groups, to borrow Lowi’s terms (1972) – those who pay for policies and those who receive from policies.

The ministries in cluster 03 are called ‘redistribution-social’ and carry out the main social policies of the government, and ‘redistribution-labor’, the ministries in cluster 02, are responsible for social impact policies via income generation through employment or social security. In short, the groups of ministries responsible for redistribution are subdivided according to the resources they allocate, with social policies being more emphatic in the decision-making process and budget allocation than the labor market perspective.

Cluster 01 is classified as ‘regulation’. The ministries in this cluster do not have large budgets or significant participation in the Executive’s legislative agenda. These are the ministries responsible for regulating sectors and establishing operating rules to reduce negative externalities (Environment), extraction rules (Mines and Energy), public concessions (Communications), subsidies, incentives, promotions and dismissals (Agriculture, Industry, Tourism, Sport, Culture, Science and Technology, Agrarian Development). Although they do not formulate policies with a broad scope or move resources that impact elections, each ministry is sough-after by well-defined special interest groups in regulatory activities.

Finally, in cluster 05, are ministries with limited participation in policy formulation and high importance in the budgetary dimension. These ministries – Local, Transport, National Integration, and Defense – are important in terms of the politically valuable allocation of discretionary expenditures. Primary examples of these discretionary expenditures are public works projects. All four of these ministries carry out large public work projects. For this reason, we classify this cluster of ministries as ‘distribution’¹³.

Having defined the five clusters, we now describe the profiles of the appointees in each type of ministry. We then analyze which ministries are politicized by the president, and how.

Types of ministries and the profiles of political bureaucracy

Table 01 shows the average composition of the bureaucracy in terms of the professional profiles of the appointees in the federal bureaucracy from 1999 to 2016. The appointment of federal civil servants to management and advisory positions at all levels is reasonably high; the annual average is 64%. Upon further analysis of the middle and upper echelons, we see the averages are 64% for the middle echelon and 58% for the upper echelon. This reveals a preference within the highest echelon for appointees who do not come from the public sector.

Table 01
Profile of top bureaucrats (1999-2016)

	Total DAS	DAS 01-04	DAS 05-06
% Public Servants	64.29 (17.47)	64.26 (17.75)	58.15 (17.94)
% Party Members	13.43 (4.86)	12.84 (4.55)	21.53 (11.61)
% Members of the President’s Party	4.09 (4.05)	3.64 (3.67)	10.64 (10.65)
% Members of Coalition Party	5.05 (2.64)	4.88 (2.43)	7.14 (7.65)

Source: Elaborated by the authors with data from MPDG (2017).
• Notes: averages for the period shown. Standard deviation in parentheses. DAS (Direção e Assessoramento Superior) - Senior Management and Advisory.

Party-member appointees represent the most explicit version of the politicization of bureaucracy and are a low percentage of total appointees. We emphasize that membership of the public service and membership of a party are not mutually exclusive. Career civil servants can be party members, and that affiliation can be a reason for career advancement. The data show that the average of party members in DAS positions is 13%, with averages of 12% for the middle echelon and 21% for the upper echelon. This finding again reveals the preference in filling high-level positions of the ministries with partisan appointees and is consistent with the fact that these are the positions with the highest salaries and the greatest power to guide and align policies with the interests of allied politicians.

As we further distinguish the types of partisan appointments within the ministry between appointees from the president’s party or coalition parties, the results point to greater partisan appointments by the coalition partners. The percentage of appointees from the president’s party is 4%, with the average for the middle echelon being 3%, versus 10% for the upper echelon. Appointees from the coalition partners are, on average, 5%, with 4% in the middle echelon and 7% in the upper echelon. In short, the participation of civil servants occupying management and advisory positions is high and partisan appointment in ministries is comparatively low. Partisan appointments, be they of the president’s party or a coalition party, are more concentrated in higher-ranking positions.

The following multivariate analyses aim to identify whether key appointment choice is, as we suggest, potentially explainable by the nature of policies, and by the extent to which they vary with the strategies for choosing each minister, as well as contextual characteristics like presidential popularity and the electoral cycle. To interpret the variable coefficients that indicate the clusters of the ministries, the ‘coordination’ cluster is the reference category, in relation to which the coefficients of the other clusters are interpreted.

Table 02 first displays the specifications of the dependent variable for public service appointees, followed by the models that indicate the total number of party members. Regarding appointees from the federal public service, taking the coordination ministries as a reference category, the other clusters show a negative sign, which indicates less meritocratic recruitment and greater politicization. The expectation of less politicization compared to coordination ministries is confirmed. The cluster of redistribution-social ministries shows no statistical difference in relation to the coordination ministries, indicating that in these areas, the appointment of public servants is also prioritized.

Table 02
Types of ministries and profiles of bureaucracy leadership (public servants and party members)

	Dependent variable
	DAS 05-06 Public servants	DAS 01-04 Public servants	DAS 05-06 Party members	DAS 01-04 Party members
	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
Redistribution-social	-1.589	-3.794	9.490***	0.995
	(3.045)	(3.081)	(2.141)	(0.796)
Redistribution-labor	-11.128***	-4.100	9.089***	3.068***
	(3.456)	(3.497)	(2.430)	(0.904)
Regulation	-16.044***	-21.034***	8.540***	3.264***
	(2.655)	(2.687)	(1.867)	(0.694)
Distribution	-22.980***	-20.207***	5.554**	1.159
	(3.120)	(3.157)	(2.194)	(0.816)
Minister-coalition partner	-4.228**	-13.344***	3.029**	1.907***
	(2.137)	(2.162)	(1.503)	(0.559)
Minister-president’s party	-8.965***	-16.441***	5.857***	2.907***
	(2.215)	(2.241)	(1.557)	(0.579)
Popularity	0.035	-0.027	0.072	0.083***
	(0.063)	(0.064)	(0.044)	(0.016)
Election time	-0.287	0.691	0.867*	0.102
	(0.662)	(0.670)	(0.466)	(0.173)
FHC	-13.710***	-2.818	-10.470***	-3.938***
	(2.416)	(2.445)	(1.699)	(0.632)
Lula	-9.085***	0.427	-0.629	-1.710***
	(1.754)	(1.775)	(1.234)	(0.459)
Temer	-2.505	2.957	-4.828*	-1.274
	(3.801)	(3.846)	(2.673)	(0.994)
Constant	80.241***	88.960***	7.260**	5.871***
	(4.883)	(4.941)	(3.434)	(1.277)
Observations	385	385	385	385
R2	0.310	0.349	0.321	0.389
Adjusted R2	0.290	0.330	0.301	0.371
F (df = 11; 373)	15.226***	18.212***	16.054***	21.602***

Source: Elaborated by the authors.
• Notes: *p**p***p˂0.01. DAS (Direção e Assessoramento Superior) - Senior Management and Advisory.

At the other extreme, the distribution and regulation ministries are the groups where more individuals from outside public service are appointed to top-level positions, which is consistent with our hypothesis that such sectors are especially permeable to those appointed from outside public service and are possibly linked to specific interest groups.

Concerning the appointment of party members, the most specific form of politicization that seeks to capture party alignment, the results indicate that all groups of ministries show a positive sign, indicating greater partisan appointment than the coordination ministries. At the upper echelon, all ministry groups present a statistically significant difference, which suggests that coordination ministries are especially protected against the partisan appointment. However, in the middle echelon, there is no statistical difference regarding the redistribution-social policy ministries and the distribution ministries.

Table 03 shows the type of political appointment concerning partisanship, differentiating between the president’s party and those of the coalition. Models 05 and 06 show partisan appointments from the president’s party, and models 07 and 08 look at the partisan appointment in terms of coalition partners. In models 05 and 06, it is noted, while taking the coordination ministries as a reference, that the clusters of ministries prioritized for partisan appointment by the president are the redistribution and regulation ministries. At upper echelon, redistribution (RD) ministries have 7% more members from the president’s party than in coordination ministries. Regulation ministries have 6% more members from the president’s party, while redistribution-social ministries have 4% more members from the president’s party. In the middle echelon, the priority areas are redistribution-labor and regulation, with 2% and 3% more members from the president’s party respectively than in coordination ministries.

Table 03
Types of ministries and party members (President’s party X coalition parties)

	Dependent variable
	DAS 05-06 President	DAS 01-04 President	DAS 05-06 Coalition	DAS 01-04 Coalition
	(5)	(6)	(7)	(8)
Redistribution-social	4.168**	0.526	2.825**	-0.018
	(1.807)	(0.681)	(1.432)	(0.380)
Redistribution-labor	7.565***	2.018***	1.185	0.244
	(2.051)	(0.773)	(1.625)	(0.431)
Regulation	6.071***	3.132***	0.958	-0.159
	(1.575)	(0.594)	(1.249)	(0.331)
Redistribution-social	4.168**	0.526	2.825**	-0.018
	(1.807)	(0.681)	(1.432)	(0.380)
Distribution	3.099*	1.771**	1.255	-0.700*
	(1.851)	(0.698)	(1.468)	(0.389)
Minister-coalition partner	-3.903***	-0.447	5.845***	1.911***
	(1.268)	(0.478)	(1.005)	(0.267)
Minister-president’s party	8.884***	2.981***	-1.776*	0.208
	(1.314)	(0.495)	(1.042)	(0.276)
Popularity	-0.019	-0.001	0.098***	0.085***
	(0.037)	(0.014)	(0.030)	(0.008)
Election time	0.584	0.002	0.697**	0.370***
	(0.393)	(0.148)	(0.312)	(0.083)
FHC	-6.131***	-2.323***	-3.818***	-1.454***
	(1.434)	(0.540)	(1.136)	(0.301)
Lula	2.018*	0.146	-2.667***	-1.207***
	(1.041)	(0.392)	(0.825)	(0.219)
Temer	-4.817**	-1.836**	-0.905	1.104**
	(2.256)	(0.850)	(1.788)	(0.474)
Constant	4.287	1.240	-0.833	-0.378
	(2.897)	(1.092)	(2.297)	(0.609)
Observations	385	385	385	385
R2	0.425	0.313	0.300	0.512
Adjusted R2	0.408	0.293	0.280	0.498
F (df = 11; 373)	25.076***	15.450***	14.552***	35.574***

Source: Elaborated by the authors.
• Notes: *p**p***p˂0.01. DAS (Direção e Assessoramento Superior) - Senior Management and Advisory.

Our hypothesis predicted that the redistribution ministries would be a priority for the president’s party because their area of focus includes programs important to the electorate. This result was confirmed. The findings also reveal the significance of Regulation ministries to the president’s agenda. In part, this outcome is explained by the fact that this cluster includes ministries that were important to the Worker’s Party, such as Culture and Agrarian Development. Many of the appointees to those ministries were Worker’s Party members. The Worker’s Party governed for a significant part of the period analyzed.

Concerning the appointment of coalition party members, there is no clear profile or explicit priority for thematic areas or groups of ministries, whether in the middle or the upper echelon. The result is consistent with our hypothesis that predicted a uniform distribution of coalition party-members among groups of ministries since the distribution of positions results mainly from political bargaining and patronage. Thus, the allocation would take place pragmatically according to the availability of positions across all ministries.

The type of minister affects the profile of the bureaucracy in an expected way. The reference category is non-partisan ministers. When the minister is from the president’s party, we see a greater share of appointees affiliated to the president’s party. In coalition-controlled ministries, we see a greater share of appointees affiliated to coalition parties¹⁴. Figures 05 and 06 present the estimated values for the bureaucracy profile variables in the regression models above, according to the type of ministry and minister. By presenting all categories simultaneously, the figures help to interpret the results and identify the priorities for each appointment profile.

Figure 05
Estimated values, President’s party-members by ministry type and minister

Note: DAS (Direção e Assessoramento Superior) - Senior Management and Advisory.

Figure 06
Estimated values, coalition party-members by ministry type and minister

Note: DAS (Direção e Assessoramento Superior) - Senior Management and Advisory.

We observed a wide variation in each ministry’s patterns of partisan appointments, depending on the features of its minister. When the minister is from the president’s party, there are more appointments of members from the president’s party in all ministry types. The ministries in the categories of redistribution-labor, regulation, and redistribution-social had a disproportionate number of appointees in the upper echelon from the president’s party. In the middle echelon, the priorities are regulation, redistribution-labor, and distribution. Therefore, appointment from the president’s party is closer to a standard aimed at both exerting control over divisive public policies, as we predicted, and at rewarding allies. This is because some of the appointees are placed in ministries peripheral to the decision-making process, but relevant to the party agenda and special interest groups.

The appointment of coalition party-members reflects the type of minister more than the type of ministry. The appointment of coalition party-members is greater in ministries controlled by coalition parties, but there is little difference in coalition partisan appointment by ministerial clusters; only upper echelon redistribution-social ministries have a greater partisan appointment by coalition partners. This result corroborates an argument associated with Brazilian coalition presidentialism in which the distribution of positions to coalition partners would follow the logic of the ‘closed gate’, that is, the ministries and positions within these ministries are handed over in their entirety to a coalition party.

In short, presidents choose to professionalize the bureaucracy of the ministries of coordination and redistribution, to make the bureaucracy in the ministries of distribution and regulation more partisan, and to concentrate the coalition’s partisan appointments in the ministries controlled by those parties. The results support our general argument that there are different politicization strategies in the federal bureaucracy and that they vary according to the type of public policy that the ministry controls.

Conclusion

Presidents seek to control the content of the government’s agenda, gather legislative support to approve that agenda, and build or preserve bureaucratic capacities to execute it with quality and efficiency. The profiles of their ministries’ top bureaucracy are directly related to these objectives. To this end, presidents establish different political uses for the ministries, which are reflected in the profiles of the appointees to the middle and upper echelons.

We demonstrate that the top-level bureaucratic profile varies according to ministry type and that this variation reflects presidential decisions about where and how to politicize the various ministries. Coordination ministries are more protected and professionalized. Distribution and regulation ministries are more open to recruiting personnel from outside the public service.

The partisan appointment is limited in both the middle and upper echelons, although more accentuated in the latter. Partisan appointments from the president’s party focus on redistribution and regulation ministries. Partisan appointments from coalition parties predominate in the ministries of their respective ministers. The low percentages of partisan appointees – even in the upper echelon – suggest that politicization is either less than expected or manifests itself outside formal party affiliation. In other words, politicization can be extra-party, arising from professional or friendship networks, ideological and other affinities, which motivate choices without requiring formal party membership.

With these results, we contributed on three fronts to the literature on the politicization of bureaucracy. First, we present a typology of ministerial groups that are objective and theoretically grounded. This typology contributes to increased knowledge of the subject because it is replicable in other contexts. Second, we establish predictions about how different profiles of the bureaucracy vary according to the ministry type. Additionally, that the incidence and types of politicization in each group reflect, in part, the threefold presidential strategy of controlling the policies that constitute the core of the president’s agenda, building and preserving legislative support to the government – and the presidential agenda – and implementing it successfully. Finally, we present original findings regarding the different types of politicization – appointees from outside the public service, members of the president’s party, and members of coalition parties – over the 21-year period we analyzed. In analyzing new connections between areas of public policy and appointment strategies in the top-level bureaucracy, we hope to have broadened understanding of the strategies for the division of power within the federal Executive branch.

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• Translated by Fraser Robinson
• *
  We wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and recommendations in respect to this article. Any remaining errors are our own.
• 2
  We assume that the President of the Republic is responsible for choosing and appointing candidates for the principle federal posts. In practice, this connection cannot be remote, while the President delegates the role to a varied set of agents, mainly the Casa Civil and the Ministers, it is the President who has the institutional powers to steer that delegation and ultimately choose the appointees according to their sectorial agenda interests (Cf. Lameirão, 2015).
• 3
  We employ the terms ‘top-level bureaucracy/bureaucrats’, ‘upper-level bureaucracy/bureaucrats’, ‘top policymaking positions’, ‘top-level appointees’, ‘political bureaucracy’ and ‘political appointees’ as synonyms. All of them try to convey the meaning attached, in Portuguese, to the notions of ‘burocracia dirigente’ or ‘burocracia de alto-escalão’ in the so-called ‘cargos de confiança’. The key feature is to be in a top-level position inside the decision-making bureaucracy after a discretionary appointment by politicians or the President.
• 4
  Since the ratification of the 1988 Constitution, Brazil has had an institutionalized system of meritocratic recruitment through public tenders and public jobs – doctors, teachers, environmental analysts, etc - are filled in this way. In 2017, there were approximately 700,000 active federal civil servants and almost all were selected through public tenders (Atlas do estado brasileiro, 2019).
• 5
  The National School of Public Administration - ENAP included in the ‘middle echelon’ – excluding the ‘upper echelon’ – level 05, in the surveys it carried out on the federal bureaucracy (CAVALCANTE and LOTTA, 2015; ENAP, 2014). The authors of the published analysis of the data collected by the School recognize that the border between middle and upper echelons is somewhat arbitrary. National and international literature on the subject points out “the difficulty of defining exactly what characterizes a middle-level bureaucrat” (PIRES, LOTTA and OLIVEIRA, 2015, p. 30). According to the same authors, “for the purposes of simplification and operationalization, the most frequent way of defining a [middle-level bureaucrat] occurs by identifying those employees located in the middle of the organization’s hierarchical structure. That is, by eliminating the positions and functions associated with upper and lower echelons, or by focusing on intermediate management positions in the administrative structure (such as directors, coordinators, managers, supervisors, etc)” (PIRES, LOTTA and OLIVEIRA, 2015, p. 30). Additionally, the middle echelon is considered to be the segment responsible for the connection and dialogue between the upper echelon, which formulates the policies, and the street level bureaucracy. It is, therefore, the difference in the conception of ‘the middle of the hierarchical structure’, and the level of political influence at level 05, which distinguishes the way in which we and ENAP define the ‘high’ and ‘middle’ level of bureaucracy federal. We considered in our definition the evidence collected in the qualitative studies on DAS positions, available in Lopez (2015) and the fact that level 05 has a level of political influence in the intra-ministerial decision-making process that is much higher than the levels immediately below, as pointed out by Freire, Vianna and Palotti (2015).
• 6
  From 2005 to 2017 there was a minimum quota regime for civil servants appointed for levels 01 to 03 – 75% – and for level 04 – 50%. At the top, there were no quotas and the full occupation of positions could occur with people from the private sector. In 2017, the Temer government reduced the percentages to 50%, in DAS positions 01 to 04, and demanded a quota of at least 60% of the public sector in DAS 05 and 06 (LOPEZ, 2018).
• 7
  The analysis period starts in 1999 due to the lack of systematic data on previous DAS. We include all ministries, with the exception of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The exclusion is based on the different nature of the policies formulated by that ministry, which are not related to domestic policy and which make decisions of a different kind such as international treaties and agreements and not comparable with other ministries. We also exclude the governing bodies of the Presidency, which often do not have their own staff and are an amalgamation of organizations that are now organically connected with coordination activities of the Presidency and now have a life of their own and even have ministerial status, although linked to the core of the government.
• 8
  The term ‘importance’ is used to quantify participation by the ministry in policy making and public spending. Ministries that produce more politicians are considered more important in that dimension and ministries that spend more resources are considered more important in that dimension.
• 9
  We use the ‘authorized’ amounts, according to the Annual Budget Law. The investment budget comprises ‘expense groups’ 03 (Other Current Expenses) and 04 (investments). Cf. (MPDG, 2018, p. 58). The values were updated by the IPCA/IBGE, at December 2014 prices.
• 10
  It is possible to claim that career servants are as engaged politically as appointees from the private sector or those appointed directly from groups of party members. In general, however, career public servants, even if they hold a personal preference for certain presidencies, have undeniable expertise compared to those appointed from the private sector, due to their day-to-day first hand knowledge of public bureaucracy. It is worth remembering, for example, that the definition of minimum quotas for career easements to occupy DAS positions at levels 01 to 04, in 2005, occurred after the discovery of networks of influence in government agencies originating from appointments of people from the private sector, in the episode called ‘mensalão scandal’. The concepts adopted here of ‘professionalization’, referring to the percentage of federal career employees in the total DAS positions, and ‘partisanization’, referring to the fact that the appointee is affiliated to a political party is stylized as such for two reasons - first, because there are career servants affiliated to parties, although the percentage is much lower than those coming from the private sector (LOPEZ and SILVA, 2019). We consider each attribute – party membership and recruitment meritocratic – separately. In considering the degree of partisanization of a ministry, it increases with more party-affiliated appointees that are unconnected with federal careers and decreases the percentage of career public servants in the ministry. The affiliated public servant is, therefore, an intermediate case, which carries both the attributes of professionalism and partisanization. Second, we believe that membership is a clearer, and more easily measurable indication of partisanization, but it is not the only one.
• 11
  The definition and operationalization of all variables is summarized in ^{Table 01 of the annexes}.
• 12
  The standard deviations in the number of legislative initiatives are generally small, indicating that the importance for legislative production is an attribute of the ministry and relatively independent of the observed political composition.
• 13
  ^{Table 02 in the Annex} shows the allocation of ministries in each of the five clusters.
• 14
  We use the type of minister, whether from the president’s party, coalition party or non-party affiliate as a proxy for the minister’s profile. Future research may develop this point by analyzing the technical expertise of ministers.

Annex

Table 01 Variables

Variable	Operationalization	Source
Independent Variable: Cluster of Ministries
Structural Differentiation	Number of secretariats and directors of each minister, defined by the number assigned to them, of DAS 05 and 06	SIAPE/MPDG
Policies	Number of policies that the ministry participates in formulating according to the explanatory statements	Batista (2017)
Total Budget	Natural log of the deflated value of the ministry’s total budget for the year. Value used is the authorized value.	Chamber of Deputies
Investment Budget	Natural log of the deflated value of the ministry’s investment budget for the year. Value used is the authorized value.	Chamber of Deputies
Dependent Variables: Professional Profile of Ministry Leadership
Public service	Proportion of appointees recruited from the federal public service in the ministry each year.	SIAPE/MPDG
Party-members	Proportion of appointees affiliated with parties in the ministry each year.	SIAPE/MPDG and TSE
President’s party-members	Proportion of appointees affiliated with the president’s party in the ministry each year.	SIAPE/MPDG and TSE
Coalition party- members	The proportion of appointees affiliated with coalition parties in the ministry each year.	SIAPE/MPDG and TSE
Control Variables
Popularity	Percentage of positive evaluation of the president in the year	Carlin et al. 2017
Minister	Classification of the minister, if affiliated to the president’s party, to a coalition partner party or non-affiliated party	Batista, 2018
Electoral Cycle	Number of years until the next election	TSE
President	Dummy indicating the president	TSE

Source: Elaborated by the authors.

Table 02 Clusters and Classification of Ministries

Cluster	Allocated Ministries
Coordination	Ministry of Planning and Ministry of Finance
Redistribution - Social Policy	Health, Education, Social Development and Justice
Redistribution - Income	Social Security and Labor
Distribution	Ministry of Cities (Local), Ministry of Transport, Ministry of National Integration and Ministry of Defense
Regulation	Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Industry and Commerce, Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Sports, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Agrarian Development, Ministry of Communications, Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Mines and Energy

Source: Elaborated by the authors.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 Nov 2020
• Date of issue
  2021

History

• Received
  23 Apr 2019
• Accepted
  18 May 2020