Title: The Politicization of Bureaucrats: Evidence from Brazil ​(with Rogerio Santarrosa)

Abstract: In developing countries incumbents commonly exercise political influence over bureaucrats through monitoring or patronage hiring. We investigate a new politicization channel: a phenomenon where bureaucrats join political parties while in office. First, with a regression discontinuity design and administrative data on the universe of Brazilian municipal bureaucrats, we identify an incumbency advantage in their politicization. Second, we find larger effects for a special set of bureaucrats: 55,000 interviewers enrolling households into Bolsa Família (BF). Third, we show that these effects are even stronger for interviewers highly exposed to voters; in municipalities where BF was expanded; and in administrations connected to PT’s federal government, BF’s creator. The Brazilian context and this evidence together suggest that the following logic might drive this politicization: policy‐driven interactions with voters allow bureaucrats to accumulate political capital – either due to good performance or capture – which is converted into rents by joining the incumbent political networks.