Policy-making or rewards: political appointments in Brazilian municipal governments

Abstract Brazil has 5,570 municipalities, and each local government has a stock of appointed positions. This study adopted descriptive and inferential statistics to observe the variations in the political strategies adopted when filling these positions. The research identified (1) different political appointment strategies, from those based on reward (high scope/low education level) to strategies based on policy-making (reduced scope/high education level), (2) a robust relationship between HDI and political appointments with a policy-making profile inferring lower coordination costs and informational asymmetries for principals/voters, and (3) party and electoral competition variables showed modest results as potential explanatory factors to adopting reward-based strategies. Also, the adoption of reward-based strategies - cases where municipalities’ employees presented a higher proportion of appointees with lower education levels - did not affect the odds ratios of incumbents in the next municipal elections.