Abstract:
The president’s prerogative to appoint top bureaucrats, understood by some authors as politicization, consists of a strategic power resource that can enable presidential control over policy production and over the government’s administrative structure, while rewarding political allies and supporters. Considering the multiple interests that influence appointments to hundreds of positions in the Executive, the first step is to investigate how the president controls bureaucratic appointments. Looking through an analytical lens that is still little explored in studies on political appointments in Brazil, which highlights the role of the presidential advisory structure in the appointment process, this paper aims to systematically analyze documents to describe and examine the process through which the Brazilian president nominates high-level federal appointees. In in the effort to understand how presidents can control nominations, we detail the scope of this decision-making attribution in different governments, exploring the formal rules and the different stages of this process. We conclude that presidents, over time, have established a greater ability to control the nomination process, favoring their capacity to scrutinize and assess them before proceeding with the appointment. At the same time, this capacity remains susceptible to presidential discretion.
Keywords:
presidency; political appointees; bureaucracy; appointments process; control
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Fonte: Elaboração própria.