This text provides a brief presentation of the Indian political system, analyzing the genesis and development of the civil servant transfer system within Indian public administration and how this interacts with the social system, the political sphere and with parliament members' political and electoral interests. This is followed by several comparisons that are established between the characteristics of the relationship between the political and administrative spheres in India and those of the system for naming people for high level positions in Brazil, taking Rio de Janeiro as our example. We argue that both the logic of the transfer system in India and the system through which people are named for high level positions in Brazil maintain legitimacy insofar as they allow ideas linked to administrative efficiency and combating corruption to be used in justifying decisions that are often motivated by political, economic and electoral interests. We also argue that analyses of the relationship between politics and public administration in both countries should not only take the design of political and electoral institutions and the postulate of electoral rationality into account but also the values that were developed throughout the process in which political institutions and public bureaucracies were constituted.
India; Brazil; public administration; political system; patronage; nominations; high level positions
